


I've been here before

by Rupzydaisy



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Betrayal, Booker's A+ Decision Making, Booker's long-very-not-fun-Groundhog Day, Canon-Typical Violence, Depression, Gen, M/M, Medical Torture, Needles, Shame he's forgotten how much he loves them, Suicide, Team as Family, Temporary Character Death, Time Loop, Time Loop AU, canon typical gore
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:02:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 30,832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28480593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rupzydaisy/pseuds/Rupzydaisy
Summary: “You’re still in this shitty game with me. You hear me? You wake up.”There's a fire burning its way through his guts and his first thoughts through the thick darkness surrounding his thoughts are:Maybe this is hell. Andy's voice and flames. Sounds about right.Booker wakes to Andy's head butting against his.The calluses on her fingers drag over the scorched, healing skin at the back of his neck.Again.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache & Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Joe | Yusuf al-Kaysani & Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Nile Freeman, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 175
Kudos: 198
Collections: The Old Guard Mini Bang 2020





	1. Loop 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've always wanted to write a time loop fic! 
> 
> A whole heap of thank you's to [Kat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kat2107/profile) who is beta-ing this fic. This reads coherently because of your great suggestions and corrections. I wouldn't have been able get this far without you! So thanks for keeping me from getting lost in the time loops and keeping the action moving!
> 
> [Alby](https://artgroves.tumblr.com) has made an amazing piece of artwork to go with this story. You can find it [here](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/ToGMiniBang2020/works/28511139) (where you can also leave behind your love for it because it is stunning!!!!! The artwork will be embedded in as we get further into the story. 
> 
> I'm still writing up the ending but updates will be frequent.

Booker hands Andy a loaded pistol and leaves her to talk to Nile. 

The kid doesn't deserve this mess, he thinks. But they're too deep into the flow of things to stop. There is no way out of this except through. 

In the end, it would benefit Nile, too. 

There, dangling on the very end of this whole mess is the promise of a cure, and despite all the smoke and mirrors and backhandedness, it would be worth it. 

It would. 

_Even if it's betrayal._

He had been clinging onto the idea of a cure for as long as he couldn't die, and now it was in touching distance. They go in, they're extracted, and then it's all in Merrick's scientifically advanced hands. 

Although they've not met, he's seen the videos of the young man proudly arguing that human fallibility could be rewritten. All the good press had been backed up by stacks of ground-breaking research. Each small discovery led onto another. It was the nature of progress and science would eventually turn up an answer to their immortality. 

To live like Andy; to be scraped raw with every new century as all the short-lived mortal lives around them were doomed to relive the worst of humanity's mistakes, and for them to have to keep moving, onward, always, _seriously_ , it got old years ago.

He doesn't need to try for more than a second. 

Not when Andy taps him on his shoulder, like it's any other mission, and he feels her brush past as she catches up. He checks his surroundings once more. It’s still clear and quiet with only the leaves rustling in the wind. She holds the semi-automatic that had been in Nile's hand when he last saw her, and her eyes flick back and forth over the hedges and open grass. 

"Where’s Nile?" he asks. 

"You and me, Book. Now and always." 

Then she's off, taking point along the back of the hedge. 

It doesn't come as a surprise that Nile has left. He can't deny the little fraction of relief. 

They cut through the back of the house, and Booker has to admit that Copley's done well in making it look like he's alone. It's still, with the tell-tale signs of a solitary man's life spread out between the rooms. There's stray mugs left unwashed on the kitchen sideboard and thin layers of dust on untouched surfaces. With a quick scan all they can tell is the story of a lived-in house by a man who's not done much living lately. 

Andy confirms the route up to the first floor with nod and moves towards the foot of the staircase, and Booker slopes off sideways. It allows her to take the lead upwards, while he performs the usual sweeps at her back. 

"Where are they?" 

Inside the room he hears Andy confront Copley, and he follows the sound of her raised voice through to stand behind her.

"Where are Joe and Nicky?" 

Steeling himself, he brings up his handgun. 

He fires. 

Andy screams in her rage and launches herself at Copley. He's not quick enough to stumble backwards and she sends him to the floor with one clean punch. Booker lurches forwards, in the split second before she turns on him, and clamps down on Andy's sides in a tight hold.

"What are you doing? What are you doing?" She yells.

She thrashes widely and he holds tight, wrestles with her long enough to cuff her with the ties he brought along. 

“Why?”

_Why?_

Each death takes something. It whittles away the patience he had for living, diminishing an ever-slimming chance for peace. 

He's been racking up the years, but in his family, he can see the eternity that lies ahead of him. He can taste the sour grapes on his tongue and feel the weight of his very own green-eyed monster hunched over his back. If he were the sort of man to tear up the world in his envy, he would. But he's not. Instead he sat there with it and the comfort of a bottle in hand, and let the tannins coat his tongue and his throat until it pickled his insides out. Until there's a bitterness in him that he's grown all by himself. 

It’s not Joe, with his tempered outlook on the beauty of the world that still exists five centuries on. It’s not Nicky either, with his unshakeable faith in what they try to do to help others. It's not even the fact that they fell into quasi-immortality together and could call it _destiny_ or Andy who somehow still puts one foot forward in front of another and faces down another century. 

It's that he can step out into the world and see it move on without him, and with every fibre of his being wishing to leave it, he simply can't. It is a prison not of his own making. There’s nothing else he can do until he reaches for the next bottle and claps the screw top between his teeth and winds it open to try and chase away the unending grief he inherited while hanging between snow and dreams of black water. 

Booker dies, and he breathes, and at some point it happens all over again. 

In the quiet times between jobs, when Andy, Nicky and Joe uproot themselves to return to old touchstones and visit old haunts, he always finds himself at a loose end. He doesn't live, and you can't call it surviving if there isn't another option or much effort put in. Like a man unhorsed and dragged along with his foot still caught in the reins, he doesn't have a choice. 

And that's all he wants. 

“Why, Book?” Andy asks, even as she kicks out at him and Copley. Her boot swipes at his shin but she makes no move to get back to her feet.

Instead, she’s half-curled in on herself now that she's stopped thrashing about, and that’s when Booker finally registers that there’s still blood pouring out of her side. 

The bottom of the world falls out from underneath him. 

"She’s not healing.” 

He repeats it, unable to believe in what he’s seeing. But when he presses his hands against the exit wound on her front, where the bullet wound fails to heal, her blood just continues to seep out onto him.

“No, no, no!”

He's not felt panic like this for over two and a half centuries, not with this raw and terrifying and so very _personal_ touch. Beneath the choppy waves of his night terrors that manage to haunt his day, he feels something inside of him crack, something that didn’t exist before. Something precious and small. It gives itself over to the crescendo of his furiously beating heart and disappears entirely. 

Booker wants to scream at the loss but a “We need to get her out of here,” is all he can manage. He grasps around for a pillow cover to press up against Andy’s side. When he looks up, her glare burns into him with a fierceness that could set a whole city of fire. 

Copley rocks back on his heels, and when Booker looks up to see why, he sees that it's too late. 

Horror grips Booker as Merrick’s men enter. Their guns trained on Andy hold him back from attacking. But she tenses, readying herself for a fight, and a new, sickening feeling takes over Booker’s limbs and locks him down. He lets it, _this was the plan, wasn't it?_ and gives up the little struggle he had left in him, even as Copley protests and is knocked unconscious. 

Booker watches as Andy's zip ties are replaced with metal cuffs. She fights them all the way until they jam a needle of blue liquid into her neck, and then her movements turn sluggish.

"Why?" Her eyes are heavy lidded. 

He leans over her, hoping she stays awake long enough to hear. "We need to know. I need to know."

"Not like this." 

It's a blow that lands. He sees the blood stains on the carpet as she's dragged out of the room, limbs heavy and eyes rolling back into her head. Then a needle pieces his skin and everything turns black. 

* * *

It's a sluggish climb back to consciousness. His legs buckle from under him while the guards haul him down the corridors. His eyes immediately search for Andy. She was being dragged behind him with her hands and legs cuffed twice over.

Apparently, they’d all seen the footage from South Sudan or from the church. 

More doors open to them and Andy suddenly jerks when she spots Joe and Nicky and the state they're in. Booker turns his head as her eyes harden, seeing the reality that they're all in. 

"Andy? Booker?" Nicky calls, watching as they’re strapped to the two beds beside them. The doctor gives him a quick once over before shifting to hover beside Andy, assessing the bullet wound that was _still_ bleeding. 

Joe stares at Andy, asking a silent question to which Andy only shakes her head. _Nile’s not here._ A sigh of relief leaves Nicky’s mouth, but they all leave the words unsaid.

“She’s not healing.” Booker says, feeling the bitter taste of the words. He watches Joe sink into horror while Nicky takes the meaning and begins to turn the weight of it over. 

Merrick taps his foot. “Find out what’s different about her. If she can come back from the shootout in Juba, then what’s one bullet? Figure out if they’re lying.” 

Kozak nods over her shoulder. “You’ll have your results.” 

“Results? It’s meant to give us a choice.” Booker says as he hears Andy groan and shift on the bed. “It wasn’t supposed to be like _this_. I never signed up for any of this!” 

“You’re a lab rat. How else does business go?” Merrick laughs back and walks out. 

Booker clamps his mouth shut as Kozak gets to work. 

He keeps it shut through Nicky’s tentative questions, of the _whys_ and the _hows_. The quiet is broken by Joe’s distraught accusations. They fly across the lab, one after the other, growing louder with his disbelief. 

Booker doesn’t bother arguing back. Not while Kozak hovers over Andy with too many wires attached to her and there’s gasping rattles from the oxygen pumps. There’s nothing for him to say while knowing where his bullet landed. 

He’s spent long enough carting the injured back from front lines to field hospitals to recognise how a medic worked to address injuries. Kozak only adjusts the wires and keeps jotting down her notes. Her probing at the bullet wound continues by way of observations and her hands do not stray towards anything that could patch Andy back up, not even when she falls unconscious. 

“What are you waiting for? It’s not going to fix itself,” Booker says hoarsely. “It’s gone. You need to help her now!” 

Kozak’s lips press together as she rechecks the wound. Then with a wary glance at the rest of them, she slips out of the room, only to return flustered. 

Booker’s relief is short-lived as his insistence for her action turns to dread when Kozak grabs a scalpel and slices down the inside of Andy’s arm. She doesn’t bother with anaesthesia or disinfectant or Booker’s hoarse shouts echoing through the lab. She extracts a section of vein, and then an artery. He watches in horror as she works like a woman possessed, deftly cutting out patches with no attempt to stem any further bleeding. Each scalpel incision leaves bloody tracks and trails on Andy’s skin while she collects a full spate of samples. 

It is a methodical butchering and the doctor's bloodied gloves package away each piece to the heart-breaking background of Nicky and Joe’s screams. 

“No! What are you doing?” 

"Leave her alone! She needs time to heal!"

"You don't have to do this! Choose differently." 

Their shouts pick at the doctor’s concentration and the placid expression stretched across her jaw slips when the grim work matches the foulness of her own ambition. Kozak continues working, taking and taking until the monitor bleeped shrilly. 

There’s a shocked silence from the three beds, even as she backs off and waits for any sign of revitalisation. Any lingering hope fades and she turns to Booker with a look of disappointment weighing on her features. 

“You weren’t lying. It _is_ gone.” 

Booker closes his eyes, wanting to trade the dull blue strips of light for the after images behind his eyelids, but in their place he only sees the blue of Andy's eyes as she was cuffed and dragged away. 

Without hesitating, Kozak reports the turn of events and Merrick comes down to see for himself just as she begins to unhook Andy from the machines. His mouth turns down when he looks on the still and silent body. "Shame. Put it on ice. We can see what else we can get from it. People will fork out for bits of the Berlin Wall and moon rocks. There'll be a black market for _former-immortal_ souvenirs." 

“No!” Joe gasps out, struggling against his restraints with a renewed gust of anger and hurt.

It makes no difference as Merrick turns to leave, ignoring Nicky’s icy stare that promises retribution. “Get with the programme, I can do whatever I want.”

* * *

After Andy is zipped up into a black body bag and wheeled away, Kozak returns flanked by security guards carrying extra restraints. They move in pairs and Booker watches them blankly, realising that they had been drilled to tackle them as a team. Another round of cuffs are added to the straps and restraints securing them to the bed, and allow no wiggle room, no chance for any Hail Mary's or Houdini tricks. 

But for the moment, the world has stopped turning; Andy is gone, is _dead_. 

Shrugging into a new lab coat, Kozak starts with taking a new batch of samples from Joe. The minute twitches in Nicky’s jaw and limbs do nothing against the tight metal grip of the restraints. He keeps his eyes locked with Joe’s, and the two of them remain that way throughout. 

Booker closes his eyes and tries to drown out the sounds of pain and hurt and worry. It doesn't work, not when he hears the gulping of breath and words of comfort traded between them. He doesn’t move until the doctor parks a fresh tray of needles and sample containers beside his bed and begins by passing a long needle down the back of his neck. 

It tickles under his skin and then pushes deeper to scratch against his insides, tugging at the muscles there until it burns. Booker barely has time to register that the familiar instinct of his body silently working to repair itself had vanished. The machines behind him bleep and blare. His vision goes black. 

* * *

There are hands on his face. 

“Come on. Come back to me. You’re still in this shitty game with me. You hear me? You wake up.” 

There's a fire burning its way through his guts and his first thoughts through the thick darkness surrounding his thoughts are: _Maybe this is hell. Andy's voice and flames. Sounds about right._

“Wake up!” 

He's jolted backwards, his lungs heaving inwards once. 

Booker wakes in the remains of the Charlie safe house with an acrid taste on his tongue and his torso on _fire._ Then he’s falling forward over his own spilling guts with Andy’s bright gaze locked on his face as she slowly eases him back. 

“Welcome back asshole. Thanks for taking your time.” 

The only thing he can do is breathe, and live, and breathe, and not give his mind completely over to the pain. When he hazards a glance down, he can see that his guts are blown out. Viscera and blood spill over the remnants of his clothes, along with some of his intestines. It’s a horrific sight, one of the many he’s seen over the last few hours. 

But it’s one he _has_ seen before. 

His mind whirrs with the confusion, fingers tightening on the arms of the chair. His ears still ring from the explosion and he can definitely taste the flashbang inside his mouth, sees the smoke trails curl up in front of him as they escape his half-exposed chest. 

As Andy straightens up, the look of relief tucked away in the corner of her eye is smothered down quickly, and she becomes all business once more. “What happened?” 

And although his lungs have nearly finished healing, Booker’s suddenly unable to breathe. 

_How am I here, again?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The sour grapes line - is both for Booker’s penchant for alcohol but also being disproportionately sulky when unhappy with a situation.


	2. Loop 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you were one of the earlier readers of Loop 1, then you're in for a treat because...the art is here!!!  
> [Alby](https://artgroves.tumblr.com) has made an amazing piece of artwork to go with this story. You can find it [here](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/ToGMiniBang2020/works/28511139) (where you can also leave behind your love for it because it is stunning!!!!! The artwork will be embedded in as we get further into the story. 
> 
> Kat and I have loved reading your reactions! Strap in because we're just getting started!

One thought cuts through the pain lancing Booker’s body. 

_You're alive? You're alive!_

"What happened?" Andy asks him again. Her impatience leaks straight through any lingering concern now that he's healing. 

He's expecting Andy to turn her anger on him for what he's done, for betraying her and for everything in the lab. There isn't anywhere for him to go when she does. His back is flush against the chair. She could snap his neck in an instant or slip her hands through his exposed ribs and yank out his heart.

He doesn’t care if she does. _She’s alive!_ It’s all that matters. 

Booker feels his shredded muscles and nerves regrowing. The bits already healed won't last long if she decides on setting the chair on fire or strapping him down like they'd been in the lab-

“Where are Joe and Nicky? Did they escape?” he croaks out. 

His fingers grip the armchair and his nails snag on the peeling leather. The pain in his body is very real. 

_Does she know what's happening? Does Nile? Or is this some hallucination from the drugs? Why does it feel real?_

Andy looks back at him expectantly but there's no anger in her eyes, only confusion. “You were the one with them. Do you remember?”

Booker sets out for an explanation but the air’s whipped out from his lungs with another wrench of pain. All he can manage is a weak, “I don’t know.”

_It’s the truth, at least._

The lines of her face turn cold and hard. She cocks her head back at the door like she is expecting company. “You stay here. Wait for my signal.”

“No, Andy, wait-”

He's already expecting Andy to grab a sword from the umbrella stand and slip out the door into the night, to get the jump on Merrick’s security team. Before he can say anything else, there's another sickening handful of snaps. His ribs realign, and he suddenly realises no drug or dream could make him experience this amount of pain.

_How am I here again?_

Booker feels hysterical laughter bubbling in his lungs as Nile asks: “What does that even mean?”

“I need to go-,” he grinds out.

“Go where? Your insides are outside! And she just took a _sword_ to a gunfight!” 

“I know!” 

“I’ll go.” Nile raises her gun and moves towards the door. 

Fresh panic floods him. Andy was fighting alone, and all that stood between her and death, another death, was a stray bullet. If Nile went, she’d be changing things he thought he knew had happened. 

“No! You’ll make it worse. You don’t know what you’re doing.”

“I’m a Marine.” 

“You’re not Andy,” he snaps back. “You’d be a liability! You don’t know how she fights.” 

Her jaw clenches, but she relents. 

As Booker waits the healing out with an astounding level of forced patience, a grim weight settles on him. Even if he had dreamed everything up, Andy could win the fight outside without his help. In bloodier battles, she had left carnage behind her single handedly. 

Last time around, she had walked out of the church. She could do it again. 

It takes a few more painful moments until the wounds have healed back up to the upper layers of skin and he’s able to pull himself out of the chair. Booker staggers behind the wall of the next room and slams a hand against the flaking paintwork. The sharp pain vanishes instantly but he stands there working to catch his breath back.

Nile’s voice follows him, as does the muffled sound of gunfire and screams. "Are you sure we shouldn’t help her?" 

"She doesn't need our help!" he yells. 

Booker shunts forward, gathering all the things he had taken last time. He works on autopilot, walking the same path around the bedroom, and hoists the full bag onto his shoulder. The last thing he picks up is Andy’s axe, slinging it over his back. The weight of it is no more or less than what it had been before, or any time, but he stalls there- knowing he’s moved quicker than last time, slowly doing up his shirt buttons as the final layer of skin heals. 

“Come on, let’s move!” Nile says, pacing after him in her eagerness to help Andy. 

“Wait for the… signal.” 

Booker takes two steps forward and then turns his head right at the second the wall caves in. He barely flinches as the rubble flies into the room. Outside the smell of smoke from the burnt-out vans is the same, and he's itching to turn away from the hard look on Andy’s face now that she's found no clue to where Joe and Nicky have been taken. 

He resists the urge to reach out and touch her, to check that she was solid under his hand. 

He knows that if Andy knew she had died, he wouldn't have been able to climb into the car beside her and look at the rising flames in the wing mirror. What was happening wasn't just deja vu, or a dream. 

The pain was real. The grenade was real. It was all very real. 

Everything before must have been a dream. 

* * *

The lamps inside the mineshaft are just enough to set up the laptop. He had made an offhand comment about the Rodin statue Nile had pointed out, and almost landed on his arse when Andy playfully smacked at his leg. It was hard to look at her again after that moment of levity but thankfully she set him back to work running down any mention of Copley’s whereabouts. 

Hunched over the box he’s stuck the laptop on, Booker looks over the top of the screen. It gives him a clear eyeline at Andy's pacing. It was an old habit that arose whenever she got stressed, which wasn’t often. She’s bunked in holes and trenches with bombs exploding and slept soundly through it all to wake up in the morning rested and raring to go. 

Not much set Andy on edge, but getting caught on the backfoot and being forced to wait on unreliable contacts would do it. The fallibility of depending on others. 

Now, with Nicky and Joe snatched and in some godforsaken situation, she was a wound coil with nowhere to strike.

“Come on Book, you’ve been working on that for hours,” she snaps, absentmindedly rubbing her shoulder. 

Suddenly his throat dries up. 

He swallows nervously, feeling a little itch at the back of his thoughts. If she had been injured clearing their way out from the Charlie safehouse, and her mortality had set in much earlier than his bullet, then it meant that the dried blood on her right shoulder wasn’t fully dried even though it had been hours since they’d left Goussainville. 

_I wasn’t the one who caused it._

It doesn’t bring much relief to think that anything could bring about her final death now. 

He waits for the penny to drop, for her sudden realisation. If he could remember what had happened, she could blink and remember too. 

"I'm going out for a bit."

She’s as brusque as before, and he's briefly tempted to follow when she goes. He wants to hold onto every minute he can. 

"I'll keep searching," Booker croaks out as she shrugs on her coat. 

He keeps up the facade of tracking Copley down, tapping away at the keyboard in silence to go through the motions of setting another search up. The address he needs is already burned into his memories. With his eyes fixed on the screen, Booker lets himself think in circles. Then his fingers hover over the keys again, stuck on the single thought that if, _if_ , there really was something wrong, someone else would be looking for answers too. 

A few taps lead him to the normal places to search and return nothing logged. There is no one else with a question like his, either on social media or in the darker corners of the internet. Nothing out of the ordinary at all. 

" _Merde_ ," Booker whispers to himself, keeping his voice low with Nile still in earshot. But she doesn't register his reaction. 

She sits by the fire, banked up again to keep the warmth going. Her eyes are fixed on the flames as she stretches out her hand into them, watches her skin blister and then heal up. He knows what it feels like, the searing heat and then the coolness that floods over as the new skin stretches over the raw flesh. 

He coughs once. "You don't have to test it out on yourself. You can just ask."

A mix of curiosity and fear flies across Nile’s face, and she hesitates before waving her newly healed fingers in his direction. "What was it like? Back there, after the grenade."

"Excruciating," he says truthfully. "I don’t recommend it. I've done it at least three, no, four times. All unintentional.” 

She falls silent again but he can see the burning question in her eyes, so he tips his head, “Ask.” 

“What do you think will happen? To Nicky and Joe?” 

His tongue becomes leaden inside his mouth. 

It's a question he had been asking himself. Even if they had been captured, again, were they also reliving the same events all over again? Did they know it? 

They had all gotten themselves into bad situations before, either through risky choices or dumb luck. If Joe and Nicky knew they were walking back down the same path, they could have already used their knowledge to free themselves. They could even be working their way back to him and Andy and Nile. Especially if they had figured out he was the reason behind their capture and Andy's death. 

"Nothing they can't bounce back from." Booker sighs, turning back to the laptop screen. “Andy was right, you should get some sleep while you can.”

He continues pretending to work on the search and lets the repetitive clacking of his fingers on the keyboard take over the silence. 

* * *

When Nile heads out to get fresh air, Booker counts to five hundred and then slowly follows her above ground to share his findings. As before, Andy hauls them out of the mine shaft and back into the car to race their way towards Surrey. 

It isn't until they're driving across the bumpy grass in the field adjacent to Copley's house that he begins to wonder if Merrick or one of his men were also aware of events repeating themselves. None of it makes sense still, and if anything, the intense feeling of deja vu seemed more like a side effect of having concussion after taking a grenade. 

And if that's the case then clearly his head was still scrambled. 

Whatever _it_ was, they were doing it again. 

Booker stands in front of the boot and watches Andy tuck the pistol into her waistband, before he sets off towards the house. Nile disappears and Andy catches up, informing him that it was only the two of them heading in, when he asks about it. 

This time, he pushes Andy for an answer. “Why did Nile leave?”

Pressed against the side of the wall while he picks the lock to the door, her hair falls into her eyes. From any other angle the downward tilt of her head would obscure her, but sees an unfamiliar expression crinkling around her eyes while the last of a smile fades. 

“Nile has a choice, Book. She can choose what she wants her life to look like. You know what that’s like." 

The lock gives way and the door slips back from the frame. When Booker doesn't move, Andy pushes past him. He drifts after her slowly, footsteps brushing against the tiled floor as they head upwards. Then he hangs back while the sickening feeling in the pit of his stomach grows in intensity. 

“Where are they?” demands Andy. “Where are Joe and Nicky?”

Booker pauses in the doorway, gun out but lowered and his stomach lurches when Copley looks back at her with a resigned expression on his face. 

With his gun in hand, Booker hesitates. _But if I don't shoot her, like I thought I did, if I don't, then what?_

He doesn't get the chance to do anything as he's shoved aside by four men in tactical gear. Their hands clamp down on his arms and shoulders, forcing him to his knees while others swarm into the room. 

Andy lashes out immediately, lunging towards them to break their formation. But they’re prepared enough through sheer numbers and their armour takes the force of her punches. While her brutally quick attack allows her to gain some ground, one guard falls back, and fires. And fires. And fires.

"Andy! Andy, no!" 

Booker drags himself forwards, struggling against the weight of several men. They keep pulling and someone shoots him in the leg to slow him down. 

He makes it there in a few more jerks before falling onto the carpet as they begin to tie his hands. He can feel the bullet being pushed from his leg, but in front of him, Andy slides to the floor slowly. When she’s manhandled onto her front, her shoulders and her back are covered in blood. 

"Book?" She wheezes out before her eyes shut and she slumps into unconsciousness. 

"I'm here! I'm here!" Booker shuffles forwards to rest his forehead on her shoulder and ends up taking a few more bullets across his shoulders for not laying still. “You won’t die! You won’t die this time, Andy. You can’t!” 

There's a voice Booker recognises but can't name that gives the last order he hears. “Stop that.” 

The security guards move efficiently, and he watches numbly as Andy's limp arms are wrenched back and cuffed. Then the needles make another reappearance and there's no time to protest as he sinks into an overwhelming pool of darkness. 

* * *

He wakes in the lab, consciousness slowly reclaimed from the swirl of drugs that pick and unravel his first thoughts. Even though he was expecting it, Booker still tugs at the restraints to see if he really is strapped down to the bed.

He is. 

Then he turns and catches sight of Andy lying unconscious on the bed to his left, and yanks at the cuffs again. 

_She was shot- four, five times?_

He closes his eyes and exhales loudly. 

"What happened?" Nicky asks, head tipped to the side with his blue eyes fixed on the two of them. 

Booker keeps his mouth shut and groggily adjusts to the flatness of the bed. It is accompanied by the uneasy feeling of drifting while lying down while the drugs begin to wear off. Like seasickness. Or falling from a great height without a parachute, but before hitting the ground. 

Leaning up as far as he can, Joe asks, "She should be awake by now? If you're awake, she should be too! Andy?”

He’s right, Booker knows. If she had her healing, she’d be gasping awake by now. Her regenerating cells should have been pushing any drug out of her body, restoring it back to its original state. Only that talent has disappeared into the ether. It leaves her lying there on the cold bed with her arms strapped down, but when he concentrates hard to keep the world from tilting, he can see the shallowest movements of her chest as she breathes. 

_She's still alive!_

Joe keeps up his calls to try and rouse her and Nicky joins in, his voice equally urgent if soft, “Andy, we’re here. You'll wake up soon, and we'll be here."

Booker joins in, whispering under his breath. “Andy, wake up.” 

But she remains silent even as the soft bleeps from the machine attached to her begin to slow, and after a quick glance over the readouts, Booker can't bear to look at her again.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Nicky cranes his neck, making his restraints creak, to ask again, "Book? What happened?"

“Tell us. How bad was it, Booker?” asks Joe. 

The bleeps from the monitor slow even further, and Booker shuts his eyes again. He lies there, pretending not to hear anything. Then the machine's alarms sound, the doors slam open, and the doctor rushes in with Merrick on her heels. 

It sends a whir of panic into Nicky's voice. "What’s happening?"

Kozak turns between the monitors and sets about trying to rectify what Booker now thinks is an encroaching inevitably.

"What have you done to her?" Joe yells, wrists yanking at the restraints until there's a sickening snap.

Booker fixes his gaze on the ceiling tiles and wishes he could shut his ears. 

“Fix it, Kozak!” Merrick demands, “I want her! I need all four!” 

Booker's stomach drops out again when a continuous bleep fills the room. 

* * *

It’s easy to try and put it down to a madness. He wishes for it to be insanity, although laying on the cold, hard bed with the pinch of the restraints cutting into his wrists was the smallest, surest, telltale sign that he _is_ there. 

If it were madness or a dream then he wouldn’t have to try to escape. It would mean that he could find a way to pretend to live with it, without having to know how impossible it was to escape. 

Nicky’s low voice reaches out to him. “Booker, it wasn’t your fault. You couldn’t have known. She might not have known herself. We can’t change what’s already happened.” 

When Joe twists sideways again to look at them both, his cheeks are damp and his voice is thick with grief. “Andy- Andy always said when it happened to Lykon there was no warning.”

Booker swallows down the bitterness in his throat. 

He heaves out a few breaths in an attempt to try and speak only his tongue lies traitorous and heavy in his mouth. 

“Booker, look at me,” says Nicky softly. “We’re here. We’re here together, and we’ll get out of this together. You still have us.” 

“It won’t be like Quỳnh. I promise you that, Book.” Joe chuckles weakly, “Maybe you want to put a bet on it? How does that sound, huh? Sebastien, please, don’t give up now.”

“She wouldn’t want us to.” Nicky is quick to remind, quick to hold onto hope for them all. 

Biting his tongue, Booker says nothing, tries to think of nothing. 

He bides his time with the patience of a man who’s been waiting all his second life. Since he stared at the fresh earth over Jean-Pierre’s grave, he’s kept waiting for the flash of a knife or the gleam of a bullet to do its job and deliver him the final death. It had been promised ever since he gasped back to life still dangling from the noose around his neck. 

The cold hadn’t taken him then, despite its many, many chances. But Kozak’s needle in this very lab had.

It worked before, maybe it would work again. Or maybe he’d have to wait longer for that tantalising promise on the back of all the blood and bone extracted from them. 

Having made his bed, Booker knows how to lay in it. He’s willing to wait for however long he needs to. The night passes, Kozak returns, and the experiments restart. It turns out he only has to wait a few hours until she slides a needle into the back of his neck too deep.


	3. Loop 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> here we go again!

Booker wakes up in the Charlie safe house to another void-snapping slap and the look of relief on Andy’s face hits him  _ wrong. _ Death had refused to take him, refused to let him find a shred of peace and instead thrown him back to face his guilt and mistake again. 

Andy’s shoulders sink after she’s eased him back to a more comfortable slump. She straightens up like  _ nothing  _ has happened. “Where are Nicky and Joe?" 

“Don’t you know?” 

“What?”

Booker chokes out a  _ taken _ before trying to drive himself backwards into the battered leather armchair. His exposed insides feel like they're lighting themselves on fire. His ribs crunch as his intestines rearrange themselves. Again. 

With barely a mouthful of inhaled air he wheezes, “Remember, Andy!” 

She looks back at the door, boots shifting against the layer of dust on the carpet, and she  _ finally  _ comes back around to the same conclusion. “Copley.” 

“Not all him." Booker forces out between gritted teeth while waiting for the same gut spiralling realisation to run through her. Even a flicker of recognition would do, as long as it came quick. But it stumps her and he’s unwilling to wait. "Copley reached out again, before Marrakesh. I answered.”

His ears ring in the silence, one of the last things to come back after an explosion.

“Juba...You betrayed us?” 

The suppressed fear in Andy’s eyes cuts straight through his own pain. It draws him right out of his own battered body. Behind Andy, Nile’s face drops into a mix of confusion and her wariness shifts into a guarded fear. 

Now that was understandable. 

It was hard enough trusting strangers, and whatever work Andy had been doing to convince her that this  _ army,  _ their family, was something real enough to keep her from running off. His own solitary induction to his immortality had been a nightmare relived, choking and dying and reviving through day and night until the army had moved on and he wore the rope down enough for it to snap and release him. 

_ Over and over,  _ Booker thinks between the fire and the agonising regrowth of another layer of sinew and muscle.  _ But nothing's changed.  _

The disbelief radiating out of Andy sloshes through her limbs. She rocks back on her heels before hunching forward over him. "What have you done, Book?" 

“You don’t understand. It’s too late.” 

Over her shoulder, Booker can see part of the doorway. The unobscured view is suddenly interrupted with twin laser sights sweeping across the threshold. Andy follows his gaze and stiffens. She snags the sword in the umbrella stand and moves against the wall, waiting. Nile tracks her footsteps like a shadow, presses up against the TV screen with a hundred questions trapped in her eyes and her palms wrapped tight around the pistol. 

He can’t move, not until his insides can stay inside and standing wouldn’t mean ripping his barely healed torso to shreds. 

Andy adjusts her grip and then swings twice as the first man steps through. He drops, adding to the mess on the carpet. 

Nile pushes forward, striking out at the next man’s legs and following up with a single headshot. The armoured men charge in, shoulder to shoulder. More than one fires, Booker can’t tell how many, and Andy falls right there in the doorway. 

In all her newness, Nile still falters when she’s shot. The pain takes her breath and balance, and it’s long enough for them to tackle her to the floor and cuff her. 

Then it’s just him left. One of the men slowly walks up with his gun trained stiffly on him. His exposed mouth shows fear and revulsion when he sees the repair work going on over Booker’s torso. 

“Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere.” Booker’s laugh hitches into a groan. “Lungs not healed yet.” 

Then he lunges forwards and dies again. 


	4. Loop 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> here we go again *finger guns*

Booker feels Andy’s breath against his face. 

“You’re still in this shitty game with me.”

It sends a shiver down his spine that never reaches the end. Her fist connects with his face and he flops forwards out of sheer reflex. 

It hurts like hell as it all knits back together. His body had been mostly whole seconds ago. Now it wasn’t. There’s smoke hanging in the air again, along with the all too familiar absence of Joe and Nicky. It’s all _still_ happening. 

But Andy _is_ here, alive and whole. She quizzes him as he wheezes out through his half-healed lungs.

Nile eyes them both uneasily as she returns from searching the rooms. “They’re not here.” 

“You stay here. Wait for-”

Booker looks up, “Your signal.”

Her smile is half-hearted and when he nods, it makes his head ring, jarringly different from the aftereffects of his eardrums reworking themselves whole. She disappears into the night and Booker counts down the time until it becomes bearable to stand. 

He moves like a drunken poltergeist, making the usual rounds of the safe house with a hand clamped over his chest. The routine of it gives him the time to turn his mistakes over and over in his head. The only consolation the last few minutes granted him was that his wounds were now healed enough to feel like he'd been kicked by a horse, rather than ripped open. 

_Andy died. She’s died three times over._

Turning away from Nile gives him the chance to think but her questions follow him to the back room. “Are you okay? Is she going to be okay? I mean, if you can stand, you can shoot, right? Shouldn’t we go help?” 

He keeps the distance, keeps walking. "Now is not the time, Nile. Just...keep watch, please.”

Booker stuffs their normal gear back into his bag but finds his hands shaking when he draws them out. Gunfire sounds outside, and there’s buzzing irritation flitting around his head. Reaching for his hip flask doesn’t help because it’s a hunk of twisted mess somewhere on the living room floor. His bruised wounds ache as he crawls on his stomach under the bed to search out the bottle of whiskey that had been knocked over in the blast. 

Sitting back on his heels, Booker unscrews the cap with his teeth and gulps down a quarter. It burns his insides, a different burn than before. He screws the lid back on and throws the bottle onto the bed before reaching for another handful of clothes. 

He pauses, shirt in hand, as a tempting thought comes to him. It dangles itself like a fat juicy worm on a hook. _I could go alone. I can get to Joe and Nicky, and get them out. If I don’t lead Andy to Copley’s, if she doesn’t come to get Joe and Nicky, she and Nile could stay hidden. Andy could teach Nile the ropes away from all this. We’ve vanished before. She could do it again._

A new workable plan to slip away unnoticed is cobbled together in time for him to watch the wall implode again. 

“Right.” Nile stares in disbelief at the new dust cloud working its way across the room.

“Come on!” 

As they dash through the carnage in the church, Booker feels Nile slow down behind him. The hoarseness in her voice lingers when she asks, “Andy did this with a _sword?_ ” 

Booker looks over his shoulder to catch a familiar shadow of terror behind Nile’s eyes. “Probably without anyone landing a hit too.” 

Then he catches himself and remembers the state of her shoulder. His jaw snaps shut, teeth clacking together hard and only narrowly avoids biting through his tongue. _Not quite._

* * *

Booker spends the first ten minutes of the drive missing the bottle of whiskey he had forgotten on the bed. It was going to be a long drive southward, to the mining caves, without it. 

He had banked on a few hours of warm, dreamless sleep in the car but if he gave in to the creeping tiredness now, he would dream of Quỳnh, and there was no rest in her shared thoughts. 

The road twists and Booker inhales deeply, the smell of the old leather seats mixing with the lingering smell of smoke that clings to the three of them. He slumps sideways against the car door and his head knocks against the window. It rattles his teeth but outside the world is dark and quiet with only the streetlights on the widening road ahead rising to greet them, one by one. 

_I’m right. I can go alone. Do a deal._

“You awake, Book?” asks Andy. 

“Yeah.” 

“Talk to me.” 

Booker exhales sharply. “I dunno what to say, boss. This is a mess.” 

“Anything. It’s going to be a long drive.” 

He turns to look at her, but her eyes slip upwards to the rear view mirror and her attention is split between the road ahead. Craning his neck around, he sees Nile slumped in the backseat. 

“Alright.” Booker makes a show of thinking. “Okay, got one. _La importancia está en que sin verla lo habéis de creer, confesar, afirmar, jurar y defender; donde no, conmigo sois en batalla, gente descomunal y soberbia.”_

“Really? Don Quixote _._ ” 

Booker shrugs. "It was the first thing that came to mind.” 

“Is it-”

“Under the floorboards back at the Charlie safehouse. I’ll get it back, someday. Your turn.” 

She nods, but gives herself a moment to come up with one herself. [“](http://evene.lefigaro.fr/citation/jours-peut-etre-egaux-horloge-homme-2452.php) _Les jours sont peut-être égaux pour une horloge, mais pas pour un homme._[”](http://evene.lefigaro.fr/citation/jours-peut-etre-egaux-horloge-homme-2452.php)

“Really?” Booker mimics back, because if he started laughing, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to stop. "Proust. Come on, I’ll make it harder by mismatching the language. _To care only for well-being seems to me positively ill-bred. Whether it’s good or bad, it is sometimes very_ _pleasant, too, to smash things.”_

Andy drums her fingers on the steering wheel while she thinks. “Dostoevsky,” she says eventually with a twist of her lip. “My turn. _Holding this book in your hand, sinking back in your soft armchair, you will say to yourself: perhaps it will amuse me-”_

_“-But rest assured: this tragedy is not a fiction. All is true._ I know that one.” He grins into the dark at his quick reply and can’t help rubbing it in. “Take your time, we’re still on the easy ones.”

With a stifled scoff, Andy merges lanes in the dark. The car is swallowed up by darkness on the stretch of unlit road and the headlights throw thin beams of light on the unfolding tarmac cutting between fields. The quiet of Nile's breathing fills up the small space and Booker returns to watching Andy.

When he catches her eye again, Andy allows herself the briefest of smiles. " _Even his griefs are a joy long after to one that remembers all that he wrought and endured._ "

The words jangle like loose change and Booker’s stomach lurches despite the smooth tarmac. "Homer,” he croaks out. 

The strangled noise doesn’t go unnoticed and her hand drifts away from the steering wheel to rest on his shoulder. It’s meant to comfort him. The hand tightens and lingers there, and he wishes it could do more. Inch by inch, he forces the tension to seep out of his neck and then shoulder. 

She nods, satisfied. "We'll get through this, Book. All of us. Get some rest."

With a morose hum, Booker slumps down lower in the seat, waiting for the watery dawn peek above the horizon to bring some colour back into the world. 

* * *

They head down into the mine shaft again and he helps set up camp slowly. Nile’s surprise at the Rodin doesn’t wear him down as much as setting the fire up does, striking the pieces of flint over and over until he’s tempted to just chuck them and head back up to the car to look for matches. He still manages to churn out the same _“Biblically,”_ joke and relishes how Andy digs her elbow at him. 

It makes it easier, in a way, to lie. If he’s parroting the same words that worked before, he knows it’ll work. 

Booker settles in with the laptop and makes a show of typing and setting up a search. While that runs, he also books himself a one way train ticket and keeps an eye on Nile moving around the cave so she doesn’t catch sight of the screen. Judging from the gaps between yawns, her tiredness is catching up on her again despite her crouching down to look at a helmet from some long-forgotten time. 

When she’s distracted enough and Andy’s lost in her thoughts, he takes the opportunity to slip his note under the Rodin: _gone alone, stay hidden_. 

Then Booker stands, stretches his arms excessively and announces, “I’m going for a walk.” 

Out of the corner of his eye, Andy shifts. “The search on the laptop?” 

“It’s fine. I’ll be back before it’s done.” 

She nods, and with Nile too engrossed in exploring the cavern of lost treasures, he manages to slope back off to the surface unhindered. By the time Booker reaches the fresh dawn air, his trudging footsteps have sped right up until he’s jogging his way back to the car.

The loose rocks skitter underfoot but he doesn’t slow. He’s keen to put distance between himself and them. Keen to make sure that Andy, with her millennia of reading people, hasn’t suddenly found a way to see straight through him. 

He couldn’t put it past her. 

With another furtive glance over his shoulder, Booker throws open the car door, keys already in hand. He doesn’t release his breath until he’s got the corrugated iron gate behind him. The graffiti sprayed across it becomes a blur as he guns it on the narrow, winding country paths back towards the motorway. 

After that, it’s a clear path to Surrey, alone.

* * *

There’s a taxi rank outside Guildford station and Booker flags down the first he sees. The driver’s chatty enough and between that and the radio, he gets away without having to say very much at all. 

“Just drop me off here.” 

The cabbie looks over his shoulder. “I can take you up to the door?” 

“No, no. Here’s fine. Surprise visit.”

Booker hops out at the bottom of the gravel drive and creeps his way up to the backdoor to pick the lock. Once he’s inside, he heads upstairs, taking the steps two at a time. There’s movement on the floor above, but he’s expecting to be found, so keeping quiet wasn’t an issue.

He makes his way to Copley’s study and finds the man there, staring at his pinned research. “Mr Booker. You didn’t say you’d be coming here?” 

“I know. But-” Booker raises his hands. “I’ve come to make a deal.” 

“A deal?” 

Copley turns slowly and when he gets a good look at his face, all Booker sees is a man unbalanced. He knew that coming here without the prior warning would have been a surprise but staring him in the eye while trying to lay out the terms of his offer only makes the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. 

But he’s already too far gone to back out now. “I come in, voluntarily.”

Copley’s shoulders jerk up and down, but there’s no laughter apart from a huff of air. “For what?” 

“Joe and Nicky. They get to walk. They didn’t sign up to this. It’s not right.” 

“Andromache-” 

“Off the table.” Booker winces at his own poor choice of words and tries to shake them off quickly. There was no time to be distracted, only to strike a deal and free Nicky and Joe. “That’s non-negotiable. You can broker that deal.” 

“I think it may be out of my hands.” Copley shakes his head. "I'm not sure if I can." 

Booker backs off, and circles away. It gives him clear sight on the doorway as thundering footsteps take to the stairs. His inching towards the floor to ceiling windows stops when Merrick’s security team file in, followed by the man himself.

"Try anyway." Even while he gives Copley a nod, Booker feels his confidence leeching away just from looking at Merrick’s calculating face. 

“Mr Merrick. This is Mr Booker. He’s one of them.” Copley points at a picture on the board, too small for Booker to make out. “He’s come here voluntarily. He wants to make a trade, himself for the two men you have in your lab.” 

Then Copley clears his throat, stepping forward to continue. “You have a willing participant here. You have samples from the other two. You can take whatever else you need, and let them go.” 

Merrick turns to Booker. “But where’s the woman? _She_ took out Keane’s entire team in that church.” 

On the backfoot, Copley’s eyes narrow and he carefully picks his words to give up the minimal truth. “He couldn’t bring the woman.”

When Copley catches his eye, Booker immediately gets it. Heat spreads up the back of his neck and his heart pounds with the realisation of his miscalculation. Merrick was a man who _never_ didn’t get what he wanted. There wasn’t going to be a trade. Not now, not ever. 

“There’s four of them. With him here, that’s three down! One to go.” When Merrick glares up at the ceiling, jaw tightening, Booker takes his chance to slowly back off towards the windows again.

Then he takes up the baton from Copley and lies. “She’s in the wind. Between Juba and Goussainville, she got spooked. She’ll be hiding, and that’s something she’s _really_ good at. Do you know how old she is? I haven’t figured it out, but there’s not enough space for her history in this house, let alone that wall.”

Still inching backwards, Booker watches Merrick’s face distort with the early signs of a tantrum and presses on. “How old are you? Early twenties? Yeah, she’ll wait you out. What’s eighty-odd years? By then, they’ll think you're an old fool chasing a young man’s dream.”

“I have the two in the lab.” Merrick stalks forwards. “I have you here. I don’t need to wait.”

On the opposite side of the room, Copley waves his hands. “You don’t need to-” 

“I want her! Find. Her.” 

With all his moves made, Booker calls out as a last ditch attempt _._ “Wait-”

Merrick’s eyes flick back to him and his surliness melts back into a calculated impassiveness. The silence hangs in the air between them as if he’s going to change his mind. And then it breaks. He laughs, turning back to look at Keane like he’s just been told the funniest joke on the planet. 

“ _Wait_? How about this?” Merrick spits back, his youthful face twisted beyond its years. “You’re _property_ now. And I can do _whatever_ I want to unravel your little immortality secret. And trust me, I will. What part of that don’t you get?” 

Heaving out a sigh, Booker tips his head downward and plants his hands on his hips. He draws his pistol by slipping one hand behind his back. “I was hoping you wouldn’t say that.” 

Booker twists easily and shoots out the window behind him, launching himself through the falling glass before the shards have hit the floor. The impact drives the air from his lungs. When he tries to scramble to his feet, he can’t seem to find purchase. Blood drips onto his hand. Then a bullet drops, brain matter still sticking to the twisted metal.

He hates head wounds.

Clasping the gun to his chest, Booker rolls onto his back. Above, the grey sky judders sharply. He adds a cracked rib to the catalogue of injuries and chalks down the escape attempt as a massive failure. Even with the ringing in his ears and battered brain, he can piece together that the security team is made up of more than just a handful of dumb grunts. Merrick seemingly had enough money to buy one crack team after another. 

His left leg straightens out and fuses back together quickly enough to take his weight. As he clambers to his feet, he sees the security team file out of the house and rush towards him. He doesn’t get the chance to take a single step as another round of bullets hit their mark. 

Blackness swallows him whole. 

* * *

Booker wakes up to the uncomfortable feeling of his arms being tugged out of their sockets. He groans and shudders while his lungs seek air. Once consciousness and coherence return to him, he opens his eyes to find two uniformed grunts dragging him down the gravel path towards an armoured van. 

He gives another groan as three bullets are expelled from his cheek. An attempt at becoming a dead weight only earns him a kick to the side. Between that, the heavy duty zip ties, and the armed guards standing watch over him up and down the driveway, it’s clear there’s no way out. 

"Have a good ride." Merrick smugly waves him off as he cuts across the path to step into his own, plush looking car. 

Booker opens his mouth, but the right words escape him when there’s a sharp jab to his neck. His final thoughts of, _not again,_ dissolve the instant his eyes roll back in his head. 

* * *

When he wakes, Booker is groggier than he should be from a simple shootout death. He recalls the right sequence of events slowly, _Copley, Merrick, window, van...familiar ceiling tiles...lab._

There’s quiet at least. Darkness and silence. It’s something he can appreciate. 

Keeping his eyes shut, Booker shifts his wrists under their restraints so that he can slowly regain the feeling in his hands. Tentatively, he lets his neck loll sideways, feeling the press of the lab bed against his healed skull.

“Good nap, sleeping beauty?” Joe’s voice breaks the silence. 

The sound of Nicky's soft snort makes his gut clench.

"The best." Booker tips his face towards Joe. Despite the forced humour, there was concern on his face. "How long have I been here?"

Nicky answers while eying the doctor wheeling away her tray of samples and dirtied instruments. "About two hours."

"She was taking blood samples." Joe tacks on, looking grim with the dried blood smeared across his own chest. 

"Where's Andy? Nile?" Joe asks, concern only deepening through his questions as he slips into the inelegant patter of languages that have been manhandled into their familial tongue. 

“They were expecting to catch her.” Nicky says, indicating the empty bed between them. 

“Got away,” replies Booker, sticking to the simplest answer. It was true enough. 

“They got away.” Joe repeats it slowly and then laughs. It’s a loud, bright sound that rings out off all the sharp, clinical surfaces in the room. 

Nicky trades a smile with him across the small divide between their beds. “How long do you think she’ll take?”

Booker’s blood turns to ice. 

When he doesn’t respond, Nicky turns to Kozak. “You should know, we’ve looked for answers before. In every century.”

“Oh, Nicky, do you remember those years we spent chasing after the fountain of eternal youth?” Joe interrupts, “Even though we couldn’t find it, it _still_ pains me that we had to leave before I could carve one out of the rockface for others to search for.”

“Hmm, I remember the warmer climate was nicer than when we climbed Mount Kailash. Book, you did not miss out on that. I think I lost... three toes in the same night. But we did not find our answers there either.” 

There’s a rattle of metal instruments when Kozak approaches Booker’s bed. She keeps her back to Joe and Nicky and sinks into a moody silence as she returns to her work. It turns into an uncomfortable few hours for him as he’s cut open and samples are drawn out by knife and needle. He blacks out occasionally from the pain, while other times coming back from death, but Joe and Nicky are quick to restart the conversation each time he awakes. It’s all accompanied with a streak of sardonic humour aimed at cheering him up. 

The lights in the lab dim and then brighten up over the passing hours, and early morning arrives as a solitary cleaner mops the floor under the supervision of a fully-armed guard. 

Despite his brothers’ unshakeable faith in Andy’s stubbornness, Booker prefers to bet against them. All Andy had to do was hide, take Nile and stick to the shadows away from Merrick’s radar. Then it would all work out once the three of them pulled off their escape and Andy would be safe for however many years she had left. It was the best plan. 

Besides, Kozak would have her samples and as long as she survived, Booker could always steal her results. 

He’s brought out of his thoughts by a strangled moan from Nicky. 

“I’m fine. I’m fine.” Nicky grits out, as if Kozak weren’t still standing above him. “Fuck. That did not tickle.” 

“Book, come on, we need you to weigh in on this.” Joe calls for the third, or fourth time, in a tight voice so far from their safe house late night talks despite the scrambled languages he was using as code. “Your guess on the flammability of this room apart from whatever chemicals she’s got in the cabinet?” 

Booker's breath catches at the back of his throat, and he stares up at the ceiling. “I don’t know. But I can figure it out.” 

* * *

An alarm blares out. 

A security guard barges in. “We’ve been breached! I need to secure this room.”

Beside him, Joe and Nicky shift against the restraints. When Booker strains his ears, all he can hear is the wailing tone sounding up and down the building. It’s too loud for him to think about the chemicals in the cabinet or luring the guard close enough to steal a pistol or dagger. 

When the doors next burst open, Andy barrels in with Nile.

Andy slams the security guard’s rifle into his face, and he drops to the floor. Kozak scrambles back from the pair of them, reaching for the tray with her needles and scalpels, but Nile flips her to the floor and she’s unconscious within the next breath. 

Seeing Andy makes Booker heart stop, but his mouth doesn’t have the same problem. "Why'd you come? I told you I would handle it!"

“You think you’re the only one who can work a laptop?” She’s by his side in three quick steps, shaking her head at him while ripping off the restraints. “What were you thinking, Book?” 

Her relief at reaching them, freeing them, is palpable even though her movements are quick and perfunctory. But her question isn’t a rhetorical one. He can see her searching for an answer in his drawn face, waiting for an explanation. 

_What was_ he _thinking?_

He could pass it off easily, if he tried to remind her that it was how they _worked._ But it wouldn’t hold up against the grim line of her mouth if he tried to push that lie in front of her. As much as he handled the tech on missions and smooth their way forward so that they could operate in the shadows and stay there, Andy was just as capable of it. 

With Nile’s help, she still found the disparate trail. Copley had left enough traces as he rooted through their history and there were always going to be contacts who would blab for a decent enough price. 

No, a lie wouldn’t hold up. It would have to be a truth. 

“Your shoulder,” he says pathetically. 

Suddenly she’s in his face, gripping his shoulders. Her fingers dig in deep. When Andy shakes him, his teeth clack inside his mouth. “It changes nothing. My team, my responsibility.” 

Booker sucks in a deep breath, “It does matter.” 

She shakes her head once and backs off to rummage around the room. “We need a distraction.”

To his left, Nicky sits up as Nile rips his restraints. “You helped to find us?” 

“It... It felt like the right thing to do. One job, and then I’m done. Andy’s agreed I can go home.” Nile allows herself to return his brief smile as she goes to release the straps around Joe’s wrists and chest.

Joe wastes no time in getting to his feet. He and Nicky stagger across the short distance to lean into each other’s embrace. His hand reaches for Nicky's cheek, "You okay?" Nicky nods in reply before they grab their clothes and boots. 

Stepping over the unconscious doctor and guard, Nile takes up the watch position by the doors while Andy sweeps armfuls of bottles from the shelves and cabinets down to the floor. She drops a lighter on top and it catches instantly. The acrid smell makes Booker gag. He tries not to think that they’re starving off the inevitable and that Merrick’s men were already thundering down onto the floor. 

But then a second, small errant thought flings itself across the choppy surface of his thoughts and he’s left dumbstruck by the quickening flames, _maybe it’s not hopeless, coming here alone, it could be quicker to stay._ The lab would be thoroughly destroyed, but it wasn’t all of Kozak’s work. There would be data saved on remote servers and samples stored offsite. 

"I need you to get up. Now." Andy orders, returning to his bed to yank at the final strap holding him down as if that was the problem keeping him from getting to his feet. Her hand squeezes his arm tight. “Book?” 

Booker bites his tongue until it bleeds and swallows down a mouthful of blood for his trouble. When he laughs morosely, his teeth are still red-rimmed. “They could do it. A cure." 

He looks into her eyes to see the horror take hold. Her fingers grasp his arm tight. “Oh, Book.” 

"No. It’s too dangerous.” Andy grimly drags him off the table. When she shoves the gun in his hand again, his palm bruises from the force. "We’re getting out of here. Together. Then...we talk. But you can’t stay here."

“We’ll talk.” Booker repeats the promise and pulls on the shirt that Joe tosses over. 

There’s a palpable feeling of relief from both Nicky and Joe when they fall in line behind Andy. Beside them, Nile braces herself. A spike of panic lances through him, but he tries to push it aside as he scrambles to his feet.

Andy drops her hand and kicks the door open. The security team are on the other side. Waiting for them. 

“Five targets in sight. Fire!” 

There’s no time for him to argue with Andy about her point position or to properly warn the others of her new mortality. 

Booker yells anyway, “Cover Andy!” 

He forces his way to the front of their group to take three shotgun rounds to the chest. It doesn’t make sense to the others but he’s not quick enough to block the fourth bullet that hits Andy in the gut. 

“Andy!” He doubles over from the pain inside his chest, watching as she slumps backwards against the lab door. 

Booker pitches forward in the adjoining room to the sound of Merrick's gleefully reedy voice, "Full house lads! Now get them back in the lab."

* * *

Booker heals almost instantly and watches with a familiar gut-wrenching horror as Andy’s body is zipped up into a body bag and wheeled away. The silence in the lab breaks as Nile swears loudly when Kozak approaches her with a new trolley full of sample containers and it compounds onto the guilt he had after listening to Joe and Nicky being worked on earlier, and all the times before.

The hours stretch out while the four of them are picked apart for more samples. 

It gives Booker plenty of time to grit his teeth and stew. 

He's had to swallow the impossible before. That came part and parcel after facing up to his uncertain immortality. 

He's also dealt in his fair share of the improbable too over the years. They’d gotten themselves entangled in hare-brained schemes and faced down odds that only delivered after they paid with their blood and multiple deaths. 

The improbable and the impossible… Booker had thought he had reached the end of that rope about fifty years ago, when it felt like the horrors of war upon war had compacted themselves like a grime onto his memories he could never unlearn. 

But there was no use in denying it, not when he was staring this new madness in the face. 

He _had_ been here before and the past was repeating itself, albeit in a pattern; they get captured, Andy dies, then sometime after that, so does he, only to wake up back at the Charlie safehouse. 

So, he waits for his turn under the doctor’s knife, waits to test out his theory in full. 

It takes longer this time around, but eventually Kozak carves out one piece too many.

* * *

Booker wakes to Andy's head butting against his. The calluses of her fingers drag over the scorched, healing skin at the back of his neck.

_Again._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _La importancia está en que sin verla lo habéis de creer, confesar, afirmar, jurar y defender; donde no, conmigo sois en batalla, gente descomunal y soberbia._ \- Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes  
> Translation: The importance is that without seeing it you have to believe, confess, affirm, swear and defend it; where not, with me you are in battle, huge and proud people.
> 
> _Les jours sont peut-être égaux pour une horloge, mais pas pour un homme._ \- Marcel Proust  
> Translation: The days may be equal for a clock, but not for a man. 
> 
> _To care only for well-being seems to me positively ill-bred. Whether it’s good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things._ \- Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
> 
> _Holding this book in your hand, sinking back in your soft armchair, you will say to yourself: perhaps it will amuse me. And after you have read this story of great misfortunes, you will no doubt dine well, blaming the author for your own insensitivity, accusing him of wild exaggeration and flights of fancy. But rest assured: this tragedy is not a fiction. All is true._ \- Le Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac
> 
> _Even his griefs are a joy long after to one that remembers all that he wrought and endured._ \- The Odyssey by Homer


	5. Loop 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> another spin! let's go!

Booker paces. Andy had disappeared out of the door with a sword in hand. He should collect the go-bags, but instead he walks up and down the rubble-strewn living area and punts half a brick towards the back of the room. It makes a jarring thump and does nothing to help him collect his thoughts. 

Nile trails after him and asks, “What the _hell_ is going on?” 

"Wait for the signal.” He doesn’t even look up to answer, eyes fixed on the floor on his shoes that are now blood splattered, for the _fourth time._

“What signal?” 

“She’s dealing with it. She doesn’t need your help. Trust me.” When Booker glances up, he’s reminded of the failed rescue attempt in the lab, and her horror as Kozak’s scalpel cut into her. “If you really want to do something then look for a long, black case. Circular at the top. We’ll need that where we’re going.” 

Although unimpressed with the instructions, she starts looking around. “And what are you getting?”

“A plan.” 

With Nile busy, he carries on grinding dust into the rug. Something had to change. He had been stumbling along by himself and had gotten nowhere. Trying to leave Andy behind hadn’t worked at all. She would do anything to get Joe and Nicky back, and she was too stubborn to let him go alone. 

Booker pauses, hand moving up to prod at the throbbing pain under his healing skull. 

It was a tempting thought. Andy _was_ the best out of all of them. The woman had seen everything, fought every battle strategy to have ever been thought up and could figure out flaws and pinch points by relying on a blend of memories and gut instinct. 

_It’s the best option. It’s your only option._

Booker’s pacing falls short and he comes to a dead halt by the TV. The rising bile up his throat had nothing to do with how unsteadily his body was patching itself back together and everything to do with the idea of facing Andy. Confessing what he had done. Yet, doing nothing meant Joe and Nicky would be stuck in the lab, and Andy would die. 

The gunfire outside stops. Expectant, he watches as the wall caves in. 

Beside him, Nile ducks in alarm. Before she can reel back, Booker claps her on the shoulder and runs forward into the dust cloud to grab the usual go-bag, whiskey, and cash from the bedroom. 

“Let’s go, Nile! Shortcut!” He yells, stepping back over the ruins of what had been the wall. 

* * *

When Booker pulls the trunk lid down, he’s smothered in darkness. Something digs awkwardly into his back. He shifts slowly and quietly to ease it out, getting settled in the cramped space. 

The lie had come easier than the first time. “ _I’m taking a walk.”_ It was even easier to pop open the trunk of the car and fold himself in between the usual cache of supplies they carted around. 

There’s only enough room for Booker to rest his hands on his chest, but he’d crammed himself into worse spots. He’d spent an awkward week after a failed mission inside a shipping crate trying to cross the Indian Ocean while avoiding port authorities. The stakes had been lower, and losing meant he had to watch Nicky bribe an official for his release from a portside jail cell rather than pocket the money himself. 

Pretty bad, but there was always another chance to win his money back on the next bet. 

_Nothing to forgive there._

A cold feeling grips the back of his neck and he can’t unthink his next thought- _What is unforgivable?_

His betrayal would shred the trust within their small family. Andy hadn’t been able to look at him. That fear of capture, always a haunting spectre since Quỳnh, was now a very real, very dangerous possibility. Somehow, he had compounded it and threatened them all. 

Booker shifts again, elbowing the bag away which clinks when the ammo shifts within. He feels one of the sniper scopes jamming in under his neck and grunts when he knows it’ll be an almost useless component without Nicky around. 

It puts a lump in his throat he doesn’t dare to clear out as the car door slams shut. Then the engine underneath him rattles to life. The sound of the radio is muffled by back seats. When Booker strains his ears and presses his face up to the scuffy material lining the back of the seats, he hears the burble of voices as Andy switches from news to a talk show then onto a channel for golden oldies. 

It’s as uncomfortable a ride as he had expected. With his legs cramping and his neck twisted sideways, Booker doesn’t expect to find the tiredness catching up with him, but it does as the small space grows warmer.

The inside of the trunk stays pitch dark, eyes open or not. When his eyes do close, he thinks it’s only for a second or two. 

Then he vaguely registers the engine cutting out from under him.

* * *

Andy is almost at the door of the pharmacy, but he sprints after her. The little bell above the door tinkles gently before he slams his palm on the glass. He sags against the frame and catches his breath back. 

Her eyes dart to the open trunk across the street and then back to him. “Book? Why-” 

“I need to talk to you.” 

She leads him away from the shops and tucks herself behind the corner of an alley. He follows in silence. It’s away from the lights on the street and far from the earshot of the people on the main pavement. 

“I’m going to say some things... strange things, and I need you to listen. You might think it’s impossible, but it’s not.” 

Booker sees her smirk back under the dim light and already feels tired knowing how it’ll all fall apart again. 

“Impossible? Kind of our roundhouse.” 

“Not like this, Andy.” 

He finds himself working hard to keep his voice low and measured. Although his hands are jammed into his jacket pockets, his fingers are bunched up close and ache from pressing tight against each other. 

Somehow, Andy tastes the hesitation roiling off him. “Alright, I’m listening, Book.” 

He takes in a deep breath and feels the cold air rush down his throat. 

“I’ve done something I can’t take back. Copley came looking for us, a few years after Surabaya. He was looking for a cure to an illness, his wife’s illness, and I couldn’t let it go. He had already done some digging and had his theories… and I didn’t turn him away. I thought we could help, in some way.” 

Booker watches her face fall. Steeling himself again, he looks up at the dank alley wall. “But if I had known what would have happened, I don’t know if I would have chosen it...But Andy, you’ll die if you go through with this hunt. Your shoulder-” 

She opens her mouth to interrupt, but he shakes his head and his words speed up, crash over each other. 

“I know you’re hurt. But if we go to Copley’s, you’ll get shot. You’ll get shot, and then you’ll die there! Or you’ll get shot in Merrick’s lab. Or you’ll get shot at Copley’s and we get taken to the lab, and then you die.” 

The frown cutting across her brows only deepens. 

“You _die_ , Andy, and it leaves Joe and Nicky in the lab.”

Booker sucks in a breath and glances back to see her lips parted, holding herself back from interrupting and calling him mad. 

“I need you to make a different choice,” he urges. “Let me go to London alone. I can go and get Joe and Nicky out myself. I know enough about the layout, and even if I don’t make it out, you’ll be safe.” 

By the time he’s finished, she’s as still as a statue. 

She had promised to listen. But her stillness put Booker on edge with something primal urging him to flinch, to step back. To expect _something._

There were times, few and far between, when he caught a strange reaction from her and it would remind him of just how old she was. Andy was more _everything._ It was something he had gotten more used to lately but in the earlier days of joining her inexplicable family, she would react to something in a way he couldn’t predict. Her anger would flare at the smallest of slights or she’d call on a depth of determination that would somehow push them through what felt like the darkest of days. 

Andy contained multitudes, and now she stood before him with emotions warring on her face.

“You would offer us up on a plate,” she grinds out. “You'd sacrifice us like that when you know what the cost is!” 

She breathes out shakily, finally breaking her gaze on him. “We’re your family, Book."

It sounds like a plea, but it’s too late.

"I can’t do this anymore," he says quietly. 

His heart beats out a tattoo when she tips her head back to look at the strip of clouded sky above the alley. Her eyes are soft and she repeats back the clipped words he’s heard so many times before. "That's not for us to decide. We've never had a say in it."

She always means it to be a consolation.

It’s never settled in him like that. 

Now it rips right through and spills out of him in a hot, useless defence. "I know! You've been there, done that. Got a whole wardrobe of t-shirts. You’ve accepted it! And given up.”

Her lips pull downwards in sympathy. He’s seen it before and it’s usually accompanied by her tight grip on his neck or arm that’s meant to ground him. “Book-” 

He shakes his head again, nails cutting against his palms inside his jacket pockets. 

“No, just think, Andy- All this modern technology. It works in leaps and bounds. Time was you watched someone get shot and they died, or they swallowed a lung full of water, or got a cut, or cancer, or their heart stopped- and that was it! But it doesn’t work like that for us. We are different. There’s a _secret_ to it. Science can give us the answer. Medicine can do more. It can buy more time. It could take it away.” 

Booker stares at her, feeling himself unravel like he had when Copley had sent through the first batch of files years ago. It had been a pitch he’d barely agreed to hear. He had already drafted a snappy email and scrubbed back as much of the electronic trail as he could. 

He had left just enough for the man to send through a second batch. What he had read had been enough to convince him to try. 

Andy let out a harsh huff of breath. "Not like this- 

“There must be a reason behind it!” Booker argues back, watching as her face falls. “You’re right, we don’t know _why_. Fine, you’ve not figured it out yet, but these scientists can do more today than the whole of history combined. We can’t assume anything. So why shouldn’t we try now?”

Her eyes flick back at the parked car. “Nile…" 

“She’ll be fine.” Booker replies offhandedly, looking for the next best argument to convince Andy to go back and stay put at the mine. 

But when Andy pushes off from the wall and plants her feet solidly on the ground, Booker suddenly realises he’s made a mistake. 

“Wait…” 

“You leave Nile out of this. Fuck-” Her mouth was a downward slash as she walked him backwards out of the alley. “Nicky was right. She’s new. It’s already confusing and difficult, and we’ve brought her into a _shitstorm_!” 

“You need to listen-” His instincts scream for him to back away further, but Booker doesn’t dare to risk it. When he reaches for her, she jerks her arm away. “Andy, you need to _listen!_ You can’t go to London.”

“No. I’ll sort this myself.” She grits her teeth and lunges to shove him backwards. The force of it sends him toppling off his feet and out into the street. 

He catches one last glance of Andy’s face, of her disappointment and anger, and a strange resignation he can’t place. 

Before he can move to stand, he’s blinded by bright lights. 

* * *

Booker lets out a groan, feeling the night air tickle at his exposed bones. They crack and slide back into place, and he slowly pulls himself together. 

It’s only sheer luck that had him thrown sideways, back towards the alleyway, instead of being dragged under the wheels of the cargo truck. Lucky too, that he had landed away from the closest streetlight. 

His ears ring loud, buzzing high and sharp. He blinks and tries to focus. 

_Andy? Where’s Andy?_

The car remains parked with its trunk still wide open, but Andy is nowhere to be seen. 

Voices come closer. The truck door opens and a middle-aged man clambers out. His knees give way in shock as his boots hit the street tarmac, but he wobbles forward grimly to check the front of the truck. 

_Hide._

A bundle of broken bones and screaming nerves, Booker drags himself back further. His hand lands in a pool of gutter water where the pavement folds down into the alleyway cobblestones. He keeps at it until he’s pulled himself behind a dumpster to wait the healing out. 

All he can do is hope that it doesn’t take too long. 

* * *

When the street clears enough for him to retrieve the car, he puts his foot down, eager to make up for lost time. 

Leaving the radio on for something to fill the dead air, Booker groans loudly when the travel reporter informs listeners that the Channel Tunnel was closed. He adjusts his route and winds up stuck waiting for a ferry at Calais trying to parse something out of the ‘police incident’ at Dover and wonders if it was Andy’s doing to slow him down. 

He wouldn’t put it past her. 

Getting himself across the Channel proves harder after missing a connecting train by only five minutes. It set him back too long. When he finally makes it to Surrey, Booker tears through the trees and vaults over a hedge not caring for who saw him. 

Copley had drawn an army of four out in Juba. Merrick’s men could _count_. Besides, their boss wasn’t the type to forget important numbers that could lead to piles of money falling into his personal bank account. 

The grounds feel too quiet. 

It seems wrong even as he picks the door in record time. 

Adrenaline running high, he sweeps his way inwards to find Copley slumped on his sofa with a steaming mug of coffee untouched on the table. The man barely lifts his head at the sound of Booker’s footsteps. 

“Where is she?” 

Copley slowly stands. His arms hang by his sides and he doesn’t flinch at the sight of Booker’s pistol aimed at him. “They took her.” 

The sound of his resignation makes Booker want to heave. When he spins away to face the window he had thrown himself out of last time, he smacks the butt of his pistol to his forehead. “No. No!” 

Booker paces up and down on the carpet that’s blood splattered, and instead of turning back around to walk over it again and have it fully coat the soles of his trainers, he keeps walking the full length of the room. 

Copley watches him. 

When Booker finally pivots around, empty fist balling up to strike at the side of the desk there, the former CIA agent speaks again, “But it wasn’t like Juba.”

It makes Booker freeze. 

“She wasn’t healing.” 

Booker grips the handle of his gun tighter. “How bad was she hurt?” 

But he already knows. There’s blood on the carpet. Andy would have fought the guards like a hellhound. There’s a dull buzz in the back of his head when he thinks how easy it would be to turn the gun on himself. _Maybe it doesn’t have to be Kozak’s scalpel. Maybe it’s a death, any death._

On the other side of the room, Copley shuts his eyes, frowns. “Three bullets. The one in her leg slowed her down enough for them to use the sedative.”

 _They took her alive?_ _They took her alive!_

The dull buzz turns to a roar and then melts away as Booker tries to calm himself. He stares out the window at the row of hedges blocking the far side of the grounds where the trees begin to encroach. Scanning the greenery, he tries to catch a glimpse of a rental car between the thick foliage. It’s too far for him to make out. 

Besides, the closest cache they had was his, in central London, and Booker doubts she would have bothered to collect it. No axe, no guns. It was terrible odds to walk into again. 

Another wandering thought circles Booker’s mind. “And Nile?” 

“Nile?” Copley frowns. “Do you mean Cairo?” 

Booker allows himself to breathe out a fraction of his relief, even with the close memory of the truck hitting him. That had been a big mistake, the mention of Nile had put her hackles up. But if Andy came alone, to protect her, then Nile wouldn’t be known to anyone. She remained a blip. A secret the four of them would keep beyond any of their deaths. Even him. 

“Never mind. I need you to get me in.” 

“In?” 

“To the lab where they’ve all been taken.” 

But Copley doesn’t move, even when Booker gestures at the doorway with his pistol. Instead, the man reaches out to touch a fading news clipping. 

His voice is softer, shaky with some kind of reverential tone that Booker never expected to hear. “She was at the fall of the Berlin Wall. I have three eyewitness accounts who say she helped rip out a section with her bare hands, and then helped families find each other through the night while the celebrations began.” 

“And here,” Copley points at another photograph, “Operation Babylift. It wasn’t just being there, I tracked the funding going into the charities too. They came from bank accounts that were opened and closed only weeks before and after it happened. Misnomers again, but definitely hers.” 

Booker says nothing, but it doesn’t stop Copley from stumbling forward to the next board and pointing at another news clipping. “And then there’s the mundane of hers, at least, I think. A fire where it would have been impossible to get everyone out alive...and yet they were saved. _No lives lost_.” 

When Copley finally turns away from the boards, his eyes are wide with regret. “You’ll need more than a pistol, if you’re looking to get your friends back.” 

Staring down at the pistol in his hand, Booker asks, “Do you have supplies?”

* * *

Copley drives them down to London in his own car and Booker sits in the passenger seat, fidgeting the whole way there. His feet are crowded into the corner by the supply bag that takes up most of the footwell but he can’t bring himself to care enough to throw it into the back. 

It’s quiet as they park on the side of the building in central London. This early in the morning there’s only a few office workers around, dipping into the coffee shops further down the road or walking briskly in the way city people do. 

Sliding upwards in his seat, Booker waits to hear the doors unlock. 

When they don’t, he glances over to see Copley still gripping the steering wheel, mouth opening and closing until he finally mutters, "I'm sorry." 

"Don't. Just, don't." 

Booker grabs the supply bag by his feet and taps on the door twice. 

“I-”

“Door.” 

When the locks click open and Booker levers himself to stand. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Copley brace himself and then the realisation hits him, perhaps too late, that this was clearly the man’s first time back in the field since he had left the agency and moved back to England. 

Copley had spent his time caring for his wife and following her death, his new research project was entirely desk bound. It had been years of paperwork before Marrakesh, which had been planned far in advance and was only supposed to be an information drop off. Likewise, Juba had no real fieldwork for him either. It had been Merrick’s security team with their boots on the ground and in the kill room waiting for them. 

This was going to be very different.

Glancing back at the skyscraper looming over them, Booker feels an uncomfortable twist in his chest, a voice in his mind whispering that he could just walk away. _Except_ , if it were him up there, Andy wouldn’t stop trying. Joe and Nicky wouldn’t either _._

_And I need to try it with any kind of advantage._

“It’s been a while since you’ve been in the field. Are you good with the plan?” Booker asks as they pass through the service entrance, and gets a brisk nod in reply. 

When they find the corridor as empty as they expected, Booker drops the supply bag back to the floor and repeats the simplicity of what he hopes will follow. "We find them, and get them out." 

It gets an awkward chuckle out of the other man. "That simple?" 

"Whatever works." Unzipping the bag, Booker quickly splits the small cache and extra clips between them. 

Copley’s hands don’t shake when he checks each clip and squirrels them away into his pocket. The spare guns follow, just four in total and nothing like the firepower he’d prefer to have when storming a place this secure, but Booker knows for a fact that there’d be weapons they could pick up along the way. 

He’s counting on it. 

* * *

Even if they had come up with a more detailed plan on the drive down, it would still have gone to hell in a handbasket as soon as the lift doors opened. 

“Shit.” 

“Just follow my lead.” Copley hisses under his breath when they see the two-man patrol standing halfway down the corridor. 

Booker feels the cold press of a handgun bump up against the back of his neck and lets Copley push him forward into the corridor. The security guards turn to face them, and Copley shoves Booker forwards again. Feigning being caught unaware by the motion, Booker stumbles over his own feet and slows his pace. 

"I'm James Copley. I have another asset for Mr Merrick. The last of the four." 

"Hands up! Both of you! Put down your weapon." One guard demands while working to unclip his gun from his holster. 

Beside him, the second guard twists his neck sideways. His hand hovers over his radio but he doesn’t get the chance to call in the intruders as Booker raises his own gun and two shots ring out. 

Both men hit the floor and immediately Booker steps forward to take their unused guns and slings the straps over his neck. For good measure, he unclips the radio from the closest guard’s belt and hooks it onto his own. When he looks back at Copley, the man’s eyes are flicking to the ceiling, tracking the lines back to the corners and the cameras fixed up there. 

“It won’t be quiet for long,” he warns.

"Lab?" 

"Second room down, door at the back leads to it." 

Following the instructions, Booker leads the way with the extra guns rattling on his shoulder. The corridor and side room remain clear. With a brief hand signal, both he and Copley take their respective places on either side of the lab door. He gives a nod as Copley holds up the swipe card.

The panel chirps, turns green, and Booker kicks the door open. 

They breach the lab to find the doctor leaning over Nicky, scalpel in hand, and Booker shoots her twice, feeling the roar of satisfaction in his head as she slumps to the floor. In the bed beside Nicky, Joe lets his head and neck slump back onto the plastic covering.

“Took you long enough!” Joe calls out after a moment of relief, and his grin is aimed directly at Booker. 

Nicky shifts, fingers scrabbling against the bed to reach for the doctor’s scalpel. He flicks it forward and begins sawing at his wrist restraint but spares a quick jerk his head at the other side of the room. “Andy, she’s not healing!” 

It’s clear to Booker where his attention is supposed to be directed, and he moves towards Andy. Her eyes track his approach. It’s a glare that threatens to peel him to the bone, maybe when her hands next get their chance. 

He doesn’t let that slow him down and works quick to release her feet first, then reaches for her wrists. His cheeks burn with shame and keen to turn away from her stare, to look anywhere but her face, Booker glances over to see Copley move hesitantly towards Joe. 

“Let me help.” Copley gestures towards Joe’s chest restraint. 

There’s a snapping sound as the first of Nicky’s restraints give way, and the couple exchange a quick look before Joe nods back at Copley. 

"You know, I'd give this place just one star. It's a step down from the plane." Joe quips as his hands are released and he begins brushing off the wires stuck to his skin 

Copley moves to get his legs, ripping the straps off as he goes. "No champagne here?" He asks while helping to swing Joe to his feet. 

"No, but the drugs are potent." Nicky calls back as he gestures to the line he had extracted from his arm. 

Hissing under his breath, Joe immediately crosses the short gap between their lab beds, hands both freeing the final loose straps around Nicky’s legs and checking for any lingering injuries. Copley is quickly ignored, and they dissolve into softly spoken whispers, trading touches as their hands smooth over newly-healed skin with matching frowns. 

"Book." Andy mumbles, and he finishes off his work to yank off the last of the restraints around her chest and upper arms. 

He lets her pull the needles out of arms herself and the IV drip leaves an oozing wound behind. Looking at it leaves him uneasy and she groans, half at him and half at her own sore muscles when she pulls down her tank top over the patch stuck to her side. Then Andy wordlessly turns to point at the drawers behind him; her jeans having been cut off and removed so that Kozak could attend to her wounded thigh. 

Already there, Copley throws over a pair of blue scrubs for her to put on. Booker watches as Andy gets one leg in fine, and struggles with her injured one, hiding a wince by tipping her head forward. 

"Andy,” he whispers. 

When she looks back up, there’s only frustration bleeding out of her eyes and hooking deep into him. "Not. Now."

The radio jammed into his waistband squawks once, _"Approaching lab. Ready to engage,”_ and the atmosphere in the room snaps. With his eyes fixed on the door, Copley hands out one of his spare guns to Nicky. 

Joe takes the other and crosses over to them. He reaches over to rest his hand on Andy’s shoulder, and she covers her hand over his before staring up at his face filled with worry. "Boss, you're still wounded." 

"I'm with you." Her eyes are hard as steel, and she speaks in a tone none of them have ever been able to argue with. She takes the gun from Joe and then checks the safety before cocking it. "We're getting out of here. Now." 

The order sparks up the tentative hope Booker had been holding out for. It wasn’t what he had set out to do from the Charlie safehouse since waking up again, but the four of them were together, and Andy was still alive. Half of the plan was done, all they needed to do now was make it out. It would be so much easier now Joe and Nicky knew to cover her.

With a nod, Booker slaps a spare gun and clips into Joe’s open hands.

From his position by the door, Copley peers out of the glass and signals for their attention. "They're on the other side. I'm counting six, with more coming. You’ll need to watch out for Keane, he’s ex-forces and head of security here."

Andy’s eyes flick over them all, and then she nods. At her wordless command, Joe and Nicky shift into their usual formation for taking point; Nicky up front with Joe beside him. Hovering at Andy’s side, Booker watches as she tests out her balance on both feet. 

But she ends up slumping sideways onto the bed when her injured leg can’t take her full weight. Her fingers scrunch into the blue cloth of her trousers and she attempts again, only to grit her teeth with the first step forward. 

“Motherfucker,” Andy snarls out. 

"Let me." Booker hoists her arm around his shoulder and holds his breath in case she decides to shove him off, but she doesn’t. She only tightens the grip of her arm. Her weight against him is solid, and he thinks he can feel the thump of her pulse against the back of his neck. 

“Just because they don’t know, doesn’t mean this is over. I haven’t forgiven you.” Andy whispers it into his neck before they square up behind the door. 

He can see the twitch in her jaw, and there’s a thin trickle of blood dripping onto the floor from the ripped-out line. 

"I know." Booker says, making sure to bite back a glib remark on whether it's a threat or a promise. He’d take either as long as it meant they would make it out with Andy alive.

Her order comes clipped, "Go." 

Nicky pushes forward through the next room, slicing across to take out two guards, while Joe covers him from behind. They quickly push back the guards, allowing Copley space to fall in behind them. Booker holds off a little longer to check that the room is fully clear before helping Andy through. 

They make it into the corridor easily enough but then get forced to the sides and pinned down as the first response team receives reinforcements. Copley drops to his knees when he takes a hit in the shoulder and there’s a flurry of movement from Nicky and Joe as they move to swap sides across the corridor and begin to thin out their attackers with fluid synchronicity. 

Their distraction gives Copley enough time to shuffle into the next room. He catches his breath before levering himself to his feet. When he sways with the creeping shock taking over his limbs, Booker’s dread begins to return.

Behind him, Andy jerks away. Her voice is loud enough to carry into the corridor, "No, we're getting out. Remember the Mali job?" 

Joe yells back, “Copy, boss.” 

When she pushes off from the wall, Booker has to lunge forward to stay in pace with her. Their small team shifts as Joe and Copley take the flank. Sprinting forward around Andy, Nicky comes to move beside Booker, and together they all rush towards the other end of the corridor with Andy protected as best as possible. 

They continue to take fire and Nicky jerks, absorbing the shots. Keeping himself stumbling forward too, Booker feels Andy’s boots on his heels. The coordinated attack from the remaining security slows them down a little, and Nicky and Booker’s winces and groans are echoed from Joe as the box around them tightens. 

"We're not making headway." In her impatience, Andy leans over Booker’s shoulder and takes out three guards in a row with clear headshots. 

The noise makes his ears ring loud, eardrums breaking and then healing again to leave a buzzing behind. 

_"Team three approaching,"_ the stolen radio squawks out. 

Booker feels Nicky’s hand clamp onto his arm and Andy’s hand on his shoulder. They hurtle forward to gain as much ground as possible before the next hail of bullets begin flying. There’s barely any time to think about anything apart from shielding Andy as best as he can. 

They keep firing and take down a few more guards and Booker recognises that there’s mere feet to go before the lift, and to their escape. 

It seems possible, for the first time. 

Until he turns his head at the sound of multiple boots behind him. 

Booker spots Keane at the front of the new guards, where he reholsters his pistol for a rifle that would work far easier across the length of the corridor. With a few hand gestures, Keane directs four men into the side rooms, and Booker gets a sickening feeling that even with the ground they’ve gained, they’re being flanked and choked out. 

The firefight resumes and the kill box closes in from both ends of the corridor. 

In any other battle and it wouldn't have mattered. It hadn’t mattered in Mali when they had gotten all the civilians out of the line of fire. They’d survived worse together as a team. But this wasn’t their team, and mortality was a chink in their armour that was too easily exploited. 

When Copley is hit again, he topples over and doesn’t get up. Booker sees him go down out of the corner of his eye and pivots to slam his back into Andy, pushing her up against the side of the corridor to make her a smaller target.

“On Andy!” Booker calls out, voice hoarse from the adrenaline pumping through his body. 

To his left, Nicky barely keeps on his feet as the security team reload. They let off a fresh barrage just as Joe moves to mirror Booker and press himself closer to Andy’s other side. They manage to stick tight against her, trading bullets when they can until they have no more. It takes a lot of shuffling to remain packed together, edging towards the next open doorway.

When they fall in, Booker’s glad for the momentary cover. In the corridor, the bullets peter out, but there’s no sudden surge of boots thumping down. 

Eyeing the doorway, Joe shakes his head. It was an exercise in futility to keep taking bullets. “We need another way out.” 

“The lift would be quickest.” Hand fisted above her thigh wound, Andy glances at the rest of them and nods reluctantly, knowing it’s not an option they’d be willing to consider now. “Alright, options.”

Nicky’s eyes flick around the room, searching for something to shift the balance and give them an advantage. But they had been backed into a storage room and there was nothing on the walls or shelves aside from medical supplies and packages that would make for poor barricades at best. 

Booker throws down his empty pistol. “There _has_ to be something.”

“Left or right. We pick a side, and go through them,” suggests Nicky. 

Andy nods in agreement, prodding at her thigh. “And we need something to level the field.” 

Another volley of shots crack out, slamming into the walls and Joe’s eyes widen in horror as the walls are peppered in sweeping arcs above them. Indiscriminate and less-targeted, it’s a calculated move on Keane’s part. The man had learnt a vital lesson in Juba and seemed to be banking on the fact that a repeat was needed to knock them to the floor.

Pinned down, there was nothing they could do but stay put and hold out until the next reload. 

Keeping low, Joe creeps towards the door, listening to the rhythm of the bullets begin to slow. “I’ll take a look.”

“Fire would still work.” Booker says, watching Nicky pull down boxes of supplies. 

Bullets crack the side panel of windows and send shattered glass to the floor. A handful spray across Booker’s chest to slam the breath out from his lungs. The pain makes him fold over, his breathing turning ragged as his body begins to push them back out. 

And then he feels Andy crumple behind him, arm still wrapped around his shoulder. 

“No!” Booker tries to draw her upright, but her weight sags towards the floor and her eyes roll back into her head. “Andy, please! We’re almost there!” 

She turns motionless under his frantic hands. 

Forgetting the bullets and ignoring the sound of steady boots approaching up the corridor, Nicky and Joe reach out for Andy. They hold her tight and Booker watches as they lose themselves in the same terror that’s been shadowing him every waking moment. 

When Booker looks down at Andy, the lingering pinch of pain trapped on her face, he sinks back into his failure. “I don’t understand. We were almost there.” 

Despite the stab of raw pain in his chest, hitting deeper than any bullet hole, he feels the warmth of Joe’s hand reaching out. Booker pulls away, mouth gaping open when he rests back onto his knees. His clothes are splattered all over with blood, and most of the rips and tears match healed patches of skin. 

But his palm is nicked from where he laid a hand on the floor and a sliver of glass cut him. 

With Andy dead, it continues to bleed, even when he wipes it. 

Rolling himself back up to his feet, Booker exhales for what he thinks, _hopes_ , will still work. Then he careens out of the room and straight into the line of fire with Joe and Nicky calling out his name. 

* * *

"You're still in this shitty game with me. You hear me? Wake up... _Wake up!_ "

Booker’s sharp inhale is accompanied by the equally sharp sting from her striking his face. There’s darkness behind his eyelids, but when he opens them, it's Andy's bright blue eyes filling up his vision. 

_I know,_ Booker wants to say, but he can't breathe. He can't use his lungs until the hole in his chest has fused his bones and flesh and blood back together. He can’t do anything more than wheeze and taste the blood at the back of his mouth. _I know, it's a really shitty game._


	6. Loop 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> today's groundhog day, so here you go, another go around for Booker!  
> a gazillion thank yous to [Kat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kat2107/profile) for her amazing beta-ing

"Stay here. Wait for my signal." 

In the aftermath of another failed attempt to keep Andy from dying, Booker flounders and unable to protest, he sinks deeper into the chair. 

They had been close. They had  _ almost  _ made it out.

He wipes at the tacky blood from his cheeks and chin once his arm has healed enough to move. Tries to ignore the crackling sounds coming from his chest cavity. He hates his bones regrowing; it feels like being remoulded. 

Nile’s ragged breathing reaches his ears, but by the time he looks up, she’s rearranged her expression into trained composure. 

He forces himself to do the same, to find a crutch in bad humour and banish the turmoil spinning through his aching head. "Oh, I’m used to this now. But if you’re looking for a scale, it’s worse than being hit by a truck, but not as bad as being hit by a bomb." 

Breathing slowly, she closes her eyes and shakes her head. "Right." 

An unshattered rib pops back into place somewhere within the mess of his body. It’s a fleeting snap of pain, incomparable to another sucker punch of failure. Looking back, it was a waste of an attempt, but he now knew what would work.  _ What’s done is done. You know this. There’s only what comes next, and it’s another chance. Get. Up.  _

Outside, the tat-tat-tat-tat of bullets strikes up. Nile shifts uncomfortably on the spot, forever torn between the order to stay put and keep an eye on him and wanting to join Andy. 

It takes nothing out of him to voice the same warnings and instructions when he’s back on his feet. But on the third time Booker calls over his shoulder for her to  _ just wait _ , he freezes, shirt half-buttoned.

His breath catches in his lungs.

A new idea strikes. 

He scrabbles to latch on, fighting against the ringing in his ears and swirl of brain fog that follows body-breaking pain.  _ We fought together to get out of the lab. Andy just needs to realise that it will work when I tell her...Nile, I was too flippant about Nile.  _

Andy needed to be on board from the start. It was just a question of approaching her in the right way, so that she would understand. 

If he worked his way through  _ properly _ , he could break the chain leading up to Andy’s death, and him looping back. The first step was that he needed to come clean to her. 

Which would mean another ride in the car boot. 

* * *

“I’m going for a walk.” 

Booker stands and cracks his shoulders, stretching them out from being hunched over for so long. He had steadfastly been ignoring Copley’s coded messages reaching out to him, instead pretending to set up yet another false financial search. 

Andy grimaces at the sound his neck makes when he twists it but says nothing. 

"It'll sound if there's a location ping back from an IP." Booker throws the lie over his shoulder for good measure, not bothering to look at the face Nile pulls at the string of words. 

Andy makes her way up to the surface not long afterwards. 

The car rattles along down the road. It's not as uncomfortable with his foresight to clear the space better before climbing in. Booker pillows his head on his arm, bracing his back against one of the boxes, and prepares to wait out the ride. 

In the pitch dark, his exhaustion threatens to sink deeper into his bones. It’s futile to wish it wouldn’t get so stuffy. Booker pushes his jacket sleeves up and works to keep himself awake by rooting about the different possibilities. It all hinged on Andy. If she struck out on her own, then she would inevitably find Copley, and then Merrick’s people would find her. 

Turning their last proper conversation over, he sees so clearly what went wrong.  _ Nile, she had flipped out over Nile...because she feels responsible. Andy went to collect Nile to stop her from exposing us… and to keep her safe.  _

Andy would  _ always  _ feel responsible for them.

After his first death had come and gone and left him behind, it was the image of her, along with the others, that had repeatedly cracked through the frozen world around him while he hung and died. He couldn’t make sense of the visions, but still knew they were coming for him. 

They were supposed to be his new family while his old world fell away. The first in the set of new constants. Alongside his inability to die, it was the solid clasp of her hand on a shoulder or neck that offered gravity. She became a mooring he was able to hold onto in the same way he could call Joe and Nicky his brothers. 

He hadn't appreciated it enough then, as he had come to over the last century. The eldest of their quartet, Andy was a touchstone, said time and again:  _ here, I've lived longer and seen more, and we don't have anyone to complain to, but I'll listen.  _

But it had terrified him from the start. 

That fear was the same they’d all seen in Nile’s stiff posture when she sat down at the table and ate Nicky’s nicely cooked dinner and listened to them poke fun at each other’s centuries. Not for the first time, he shakes in anger, because nothing ever makes sense. 

Why does he awake back at the safe house? Why not Juba, or at El Fenn? If it were earlier, he could stop it all before it starts. Why... does it have to be at the same time she stops healing? 

The sound of the engine disappears and Booker swears in the dark, fumbling for the safety catch. Kicking the trunk upwards to climb out, he’s already searching for Andy before his boots land on the ground. 

Further down the low-lit street he sees her disappear into the pharmacy. 

_ Here we go again _ , Booker thinks uneasily as he jogs after her. 

* * *

Andy’s eyes instantly flick over to him when the doorbell chimes above his head. Surprise flashes across her face, but then she ducks her head and adjusts the wire basket in her hand. 

Any other time, he would have taken the hint and left her be. 

But he’s too aware of the invisible clock running down on her. Instead of following her, Booker takes a circuitous path to the aisle opposite her. The shelves aren’t high, and he catches her eye every time she looks over the tops of cough medicine bottles and antiseptic. 

Keeping the distance, Booker mirrors her steps until they’re far enough from both the door and the cashier to speak. 

“What is it? Nile?” Andy asks under her breath, and he shakes his head. “Copley?” 

He keeps his lips pressed together, suddenly feeling a dryness in his mouth that has him choking on his tongue. It’s the wrong time for it, but he can feel the press of her hands on his chest, pushing him back into the road, see the look on her face before the truck hit. 

"Book," she says his name slowly, drawing out her question as the wheels spin within her brain. "Why are you  _ here _ ?"

He coughs once to clear his throat, his shaking hand brushing over his forehead. “We need to talk, about Merrick, about Copley, about all of this- Andy, I've made a mistake. I need your help or it's going to end very badly.”

Her eyes widen in horror, and suddenly she goes very, very still. 

"Book." She breathes out softly, slowly lifting her head to look squarely back at him. 

He feels like an insect pinned out on a board. He thinks he wouldn’t mind if there was a way for her to pick apart his mistake, cleave it out from him, and allow a way to right things. 

"What did you do?" 

Booker shakes his head, aware of the distance between her, the door, and himself. If she chose to run now, he might not be able to stop her. It can’t happen like that again. He can’t let it. As he walks to the end of the aisle and moves to stand beside her, the cashier approaches them. 

Her footsteps are quicker than his, closing the gap to Andy before he’s rounded the end of the aisle. She stands in contrast to Andy’s unfashionable clothes and long coat with her dark makeup and pressed apron. The difference makes it abundantly clear they’re not locals or tourists out for the evening.

“Can I help you? Are you looking for something?” The cashier twists to face Andy, speaking in English with an accent dulled by the late hour. 

“No, we’re fine.” Booker returns with the most placid of smiles slapped onto his face, eager to let her get back to the till and whatever book or app she had been tapping away at on her phone. “Just getting a few things.” 

Beside him, Andy knocks a handful of random boxes into her basket. 

“I was asking her.” The cashier’s eyes remained fixed on Andy. 

Booker blinks. “What?” 

“Do you need help?” When she asks again, insistence seeps into her voice. 

At that, Andy looks up and a twitch in her face translates to something the cashier understands. The young woman stares back at Booker before she points at the sign printed in a giant font glued to the wall above the tills stating:  _ ‘we reserve the right to refuse service’ _ . 

“Please leave.” The cashier states flatly.

“What?” 

Andy scoffs under her breath, eyes tipped back down at the small pile of useful and useless things she had swept into her basket. “Go wait outside, Book.” 

“Fine.” 

* * *

The light spills out onto the pavement from behind him and Booker stands outside in the cold. He knows there’s a couple sitting at one of the outdoor cafe tables drinking wine, but he doesn’t want to move away from the door. Not when Andy could slip out of the pharmacy and disappear into the night. 

The minutes pass and Booker watches the truck that had flattened him before drive past, still too fast, throwing dirty water up from the gutter onto the pavement. He shoves his hands in his pockets and scowls when it turns the corner. 

When Andy finally comes out, she rolls out her shoulder slowly. 

Her grimace meets his, but then he looks up at the night sky and all the clouds pushing on to bring forth dawn. 

The closest bit of cover on the street is under the awning of a clothes shop. He leads her there, away from the pharmacy and in the opposite direction to the alleyway he had dragged himself to after being smashed to pieces. 

Andy leans up against the wall, refusing to speak first. 

As much as he wants to say something,  _ anything _ , Booker still hesitates. It leaves him trapped between glancing away from her steely eyes, only to look back. He knows he’ll not get any consolation from her; not that he's looking for any. 

Finally he whispers, "I can't fix this on my own." 

"It's a mess of your own making," she snaps back. 

But in the half-light, Booker can see the panic on her face and knows his next words will do nothing to ease it. 

"Copley said that Merrick wants you. He won't stop. He has the money and the means. It’s not enough to disappear now, or to go to Surrey. You have to listen to me, we need to do this differently than charging in.” 

“They have Joe and Nicky.” 

It really is as simple as that for her. It makes him want to yell  _ what about you? _ , but that didn’t work before and it was just as unlikely to work now. 

“No, they know what we are capable of and they’re playing the game. Andy, they’re waiting for us to surface. If we’re taken, then it’s all over. They won’t let us go."

Glaring into the dark of the street, she crosses her arms tight. "Why did you do it, Book? You know what this is, for us. To be captured, it's worse than death."

Bile churns in Booker’s stomach. A low chuckle escapes him before he can stop it. "Worse than death?" 

"Book-" Andy’s voice cracks and he can feel the same pressure bearing down on him. 

She was trying to avoid the past just as much as he was. Quỳnh’s capture had scarred her, and like his, it was an irreversible wound. Only Andy’s mistake had happened so long ago, and there was nothing she could have done to fix it. It didn’t mean she would wind up losing her mortality and her life in quick succession.

"No, you asked why,” he retorts. “I'm telling the truth. Worse? I just, I want it to end. I want there to be a choice."

Andy shakes her head frantically. "It doesn’t work like that. We don't get a say in it. We never have."

He’s heard those words from her before. He’s laughed at them and raged at them but he’s never been able to change them. Just as he kept chasing after an explanation, Booker knew Andy had spent double or even triple that amount of time coming around to a weary acceptance; it was Lykon who died first, and not her. 

"What if we could?” He rolls to lean sideways against the wall. “What then? Would you take it?"

Tipping her head back past the awning, Andy stares up at the night sky, looking tired and perhaps for the first time in a long time, breakable. 

"Would you?" Booker asks softly. 

She just sighs. 

He thought he knew the answer. 

Booker had always been so sure of himself, of what she had wanted. They'd always danced around the question and their own answers. But the sentiment had been shared all too often over drinks and long, dark nights when the world seemed to be filled to the brim with shadows and grief and their unending tiredness. 

Two hundred years, and he would have thought it would be the last kindness for himself, to be able to hold the only choice that mattered within his hands. 

“Andy?”

"I've lived a long time. Sometimes I think, too long. But we are who we are, Book." Her voice turns thick with moroseness. When she opens her mouth again, a hardness lines her teeth. "And you threw us to the wolves." 

"I did." 

While waiting for the snap of her anger, Booker feels the cold of the wall seep through his jacket. It barely touches the cold that has sunk into his bones. Andy doesn’t raise her voice as he expects, and instead she falls back into a strained silence. 

She swallows twice before she manages to speak again. "Nile dreamed of Quỳnh." 

Her hoarseness doesn’t lie in a suppressed anger, but from a pain that’s all too familiar to him. But it was rare for her to allow it to dredge up to surface.

"She did.”

The cold feeling enveloping Booker shifts. 

It dives through his bones and doubles back to pluck gooseflesh across his skin. It merges with the memories he’s forever carrying in his mind's eye, inseparable from his night terrors. Those images and the connection to Quỳnh’s pain turn the inside of his mouth dry once more, crusting his tongue with the taste of sea salt. 

He had been dreading this conversation ever since Nile had bolted upright, shaken to her core for sharing in Quỳnh's constant cycle of dying and being brought back. The dreams that were meant to lead them together had swallowed Booker whole from the start of his new life. 

Foolishly, Booker had pretended to go about his life in Marseille after his first death. Despite the comfort of being surrounded by his family, there had been a chasm left behind he was unable to bridge and he had remained adrift. In his desperation to ground himself, they had watched his wounds heal up after bar brawls or from drunkenly tidying shards of broken wine bottles, and then made their own assumptions.

His dreams of Quỳnh only added to the void within him, and he had continued to drown in more ways than just water. 

_ Does she feel the same?  _

Booker hadn't had the chance to think about it for long. 

Out of the corner of her eye, Andy glances at him. "You told me they had stopped." 

"I lied." Booker says with a flinty smile, because even now he still couldn't tell her the truth, not without the words burning through his tongue,  _ when you looked at me you were looking at two people, neither one you could help. _

It wasn't her fault. He knew that. 

He had learnt long ago that guilt didn’t ask for permission before swallowing a man. It hollowed out a place regardless and planted itself deep. He knows it too well, having carried it for the better part of two centuries with the fading memories of his family. It had rotted him from within, while his skin knitted back anew from all the bullet holes and sword slashes. 

“A choice, Andy. It’s what we deserve, isn’t it?”

Her mouth transforms into a downturned slash across her face and there's heartbreak in her eyes before she closes them. She tips her head until it rests against the wall, looking smaller, tired somehow, but he thinks that perhaps that's something that comes from losing an almost-eternal immortality.

Booker reaches out a hand from his pocket, cautiously, and holds it out halfway between them. Her eyes flick open and she bridges the gap. Her cold thin fingers wrap tight around his warmer ones. 

"I'd take it from you, if you could trade it," he says quietly. 

"We were supposed to be in this together,” she laments. 

"Joe and Nicky, they've always had each other. You had Lykon and Quỳnh before..." He trails off, not wanting to prod at old wounds. 

"And Nile?" Andy asks, still not thinking of herself in the present. He can’t stop, not while holding her breakable bones in his hand. "She's brand new. A fucking baby, and even after knowing that, you still went ahead with this..."

"I can’t take it back. Merrick is out there. Hell, the idea of it _ , this, _ is out there. They’ll chase the impossible anyway." Booker holds his breath, feeling his lungs burn with the panic again as she glances across the street, waiting for the answer to her implied question. "Andy, it's  _ always  _ been there. I didn't know how to let go of it." 

"Not even for us?” Her voice slips from achingly soft to stilted as she tugs her hand free from his. “When you know what this means for us. How we'd be hunted down, locked up, experimented on. Not even when you feel what Quỳnh feels."

Booker swallows, the salt on his tongue coming back. 

She tenses and her hands return to gripping her arms tight. "You would bring that suffering on us?" 

"Suffering? This has haunted me since...my wife, since my sons. Since Jean-Pierre- I don't want to keep living like this. I went back home, and for what? To watch them die?" 

"And us? Book, what about us? You’d see the same thing happen to us, over and over?" 

If Andy had decided to strike out at him, it wouldn’t have taken the air from his lungs in the same way as her words did. Booker shakes his head violently. “No- I- It was supposed to be a gift. The hope of an end was all I’ve ever wanted. I didn't- I didn't think beyond it."

Andy drops her head, bowing her shoulders as though he's just gone and placed the weight of the world on her. Then she straightens up beside him, pushing herself off the wall. His thoughts falter when she takes hold of his shoulders. Her grip is tight enough to keep pressing in bruises. 

"Team _.  _ Family _. _ We are all we have in this world.” Her face dips close and her eyes bore deep into his. “Who could put a name on what we are to each other after all this time? I haven't been able to."

The realisation hits him only after Andy’s grip tightens. Her cold fingers wrap around his upper arms and she twists to lock him in place against the wall. "But I can't trust you, Book."

He wriggles like a worm on a hook. Adrenaline buzzes through Booker’s veins as he sees a new plan slot into place behind her eyes. "Please, let me-" 

"I'll get them back myself."

Andy delivers her closed fist right into his solar plexus. It slams hard into his ribs. Booker feels them shattering under her blow, hears her wince in pain from it. 

He slides down against the wall, wheezing and groaning. He watches her race back across the street to the car to slam the boot shut and wrench the driver’s door open. By the time he’s back on his feet, she’s already put it into gear. 

It doesn’t stop him from trying to chase her down the street, even as she turns the corner at a squealing speed and races right out of sight. 

_ She took the car, the damn car!  _

* * *

It’s not quiet enough on the same road to steal a car. 

Booker stumbles his way a few streets over. He digs through his pockets, trying to flag down a taxi. But it’s late and there's no one willing to take him further than the local train station where the trains were still running. 

He has to run another twenty minutes away from the town centre to where the streets are quieter and half-threaten, half-cajole an unwitting taxi driver into opening his door. The task is only accomplished when Booker forces his arm in through the partially-open window and unlocks the passenger seat door behind the protesting man. 

"Go! Go!" 

Booker empties his wallet over the front passenger seat. The notes float onto the peeling leather and the change slips between the seats.

Reluctantly, the driver peels away from the curb, muttering insults and curses under his breath. Booker absently rubs at his no-longer bruised chest and watches the dark hedges lining the road blur into thick streams of black and dappled gold.

He hadn’t convinced her of anything. 

_ Dammit Andy. It wasn’t meant to be like this again!  _

She was miles ahead already and Booker could feel the time slipping away. 

* * *

Booker slips in via a smaller side door that leads him into the basement garage. From there, he moves quickly, following the markings on the floor and walls to the stairwell. There’s a small camera fixed in the corner, but he sprints across and hits the stairs running. Speed, he knew, was essential.

It takes him as far as the tenth floor. 

He pushes the door open slowly while listening carefully for movement. A middle-aged security guard dozes on a stool a few feet away. Booker tackles him into the blind spot of the camera facing down the corridor. 

He slams the guard’s head against the floor twice to knock him out and takes his swipe card and gun. The alarm starts blaring as he jogs down the corridor. There’s a glass door between the far staircase and himself, and when the swipe card doesn’t grant him access, and he doesn't think twice about shooting it out. 

Barrelling into the next stairwell, Booker begins to run up the flights as fast as he can, but there’s the sound of heavy boots from both above and below, and he’s blocked off. 

"Lower your weapon! Now!"

He wouldn’t make it to the lab. 

There was nothing he could do for Joe and Nicky. Odds were that Andy had already been captured. Even with her head start, they would have been waiting for her at Copley’s. And if she was already in the lab, he wouldn’t be able to free her either. He’d be strapped down beside her to watch her die again. 

But if Andy wasn’t there-

He could find out. 

“Lower it!” 

Instead, Booker slides his finger onto the trigger and raises the gun to his chin. 

* * *

He wakes in the safe house with the fading warmth of her touch on the back of his neck and despite the fire in his guts, he feels very, very cold. 

_ Fuck.  _

_ Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. _


	7. Loop 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello lovely readers. We’re really in it now.  
> When I originally outlined this chapter had the shortest description – ‘peak go king – give us nothing’...

He had thought telling Andy would have fixed it. He’d tried it two ways and only opened old wounds. 

Reaching for the passports and shared stash of cash, Booker tries to imagine how she would react if he told her he was reliving the same day and a half over and over in some kind of bizarre purgatory. 

“Come on! Let’s move!” Nile calls, jerking Booker out of his thoughts.

The errant temptation to tell her the _full_ truth melts into slurry against the heat of madness and anger lodged in his throat. 

In all the things Andy had experienced, she'd never had to wrestle with time twisting back on itself and he can see himself giving a disjointed explanation; _Hey Andy, I’ve got something a bit stronger than déjà vu, and it keeps happening, because you keep dying. Oh, and you keep dying because we’re all being hunted by the youngest pharma CEO in history who also happens to be an immoral, profit-hungry bastard. How does he know about us, you ask? That would be my fault entirely, you see I was the one who made contact with the former CIA agent who set us up. My bad._

But then, Andy had never committed this kind of betrayal. 

They were already chosen somehow, in some way. It was part of the reasoning the three of them had clung to over the centuries. It helped to make sense of the purpose they had chosen, and perhaps this was the punishment for turning his back on it. For not believing in it. 

If he had a choice between living with this uncertain immortality or his next death being the final one, he'd rather have his immortality stripped from him. But maybe that was a kindness in itself. Nothing about it made sense, nothing about it was deserved, for anyone. 

Booker jams the clothes into the bag, slings the case holding Andy’s axe over his shoulder and feels the swell of anger rise up once more. He turns his head to watch the wall disintegrate, but it’s barely satisfying and does nothing to quell the nauseating feeling that wants to lash out too. 

“ _That’s_ the signal. Let’s go!”

* * *

As usual, things hadn’t gone well. 

When Booker woke in the safehouse once more, he couldn’t remember how many times he’d been thrown back into the past. 

His original suspicion of it being a dream had been wishful thinking at best. It was clearly a nightmare of some sort, but one flawed in design. If there was supposed to be an invisible hand nudging him along, dragging him back, then he was failing to see it or any pattern to it. There was only Andy’s inevitable death all blurring together.

Booker gathers up his unravelling thoughts and gives Andy and Nile the slip as soon as he can. It wasn’t a new idea, to strike out on his own, but he was unwilling to watch events unfold badly, again. It was too tiring. 

Instead, he made his way directly to Merrick's headquarters with the intention of fighting his way up to the lab. 

It felt cathartic.

Until he revives in a haze of pain with the security guards hauling him down the corridor. He jerks and gasps as the bullets tinkle out of him. They drop to the floor, taking the pyrrhic victory with them. His blood-coated boots paint a smeared trails all the way to the lab. 

He's not sure why he thought this would make him feel any better. 

_Worth a shot._

"Clean up on aisle four." Booker mutters under his breath as the doors to the lab are thrown open for him. 

He spots the pristine white lab coat first. _She's_ hovering over her desk and labelling her samples. The sight of the surgical tools puts a spike in his heart rate, but he tramples it down. It’s the certainty of her presence. Having the knowledge of what comes next, and the snap of being thrown back to seeing Andy’s face finally unravels him. 

"Of all the gin-joints in town." Booker manages to get out before a bout of wheezing laughter overcomes him. 

The air in his lungs stalls when he sees Joe and Nicky fighting past the pain. His half-hearted chuckle dies on his lips. 

Joe and Nicky, who had seen so much history take place before their eyes. Seen the slivers of the best of humanity, all the progress and joy that people have brought to each other, and alongside all of that, the worst. They had made their choice to face it all, together. 

They were older than him. They had lived through more and were better settled in their age, but Booker was the one who had seen the future. Their future. 

He had lived it. He knew what that loss felt like. Death had parted him from his wife, just like Andy had seen Lyon’s death with her own eyes and watched it shatter her millennia-old assumptions. Lykon’s presence in their team's history was a marker buried deep into the past. His fate had fixed Booker with a strange hope, and he clung to it, an anomaly of an anomaly. 

After having love ripped out of him, Booker had been left with a wound that would never heal. Everything else did, bullets, decapitation, everything else but _that_. It would bleed on regardless, leaving its bloody marks over the rest of his years. Nearly two centuries and it hadn’t abated. 

And that was the crux of it. Because no matter how many years they had or would have, the fear still existed with every death. 

Despite Nicky and Joe’s certainty of having entered into this new life together, that somehow, _destiny_ would ensure they would leave it in the same way, Booker knew it would never make the unscrupulous looks and stray comments disappear. It haunted them in silent ways, leaving the unspoken question of what they would do if one day, one of them didn't heal. 

When Booker gets slammed onto the lab bed, he sees how Nicky and Joe turn to face him, strain against their restraints in their concern for him. 

"Booker?" 

“What happened to you?”

“Where’s Andy?” 

Ignoring their questions, Booker coughs blood onto his shirt for good measure and continues laughing himself hoarse until Kozak sedates him. 

* * *

“Hey. Hey. Book.” He hears Andy whispering as he’s drifting in his own consciousness. “Come on. Come back to me.” 

Feeling his insides burn and burn and piece themselves back together, Booker reaches for the surface automatically, and then holds steady, caught in the dark, caught within the strange confines of death and life, and wants to hold himself there. 

“You’re still in this shitty game with me. You hear me? Wake up.” 

If he doesn’t wake, he won’t have to go through it again. 

“Wake up!” 

Andy slaps him and he races to the surface like a burst of bubbles merging into seafoam. 

* * *

Booker sits in the mineshaft and plays at searching down Copley. It’s one way of passing the time and more for the sake of doing something differently. He sets himself the task of making a good show of it, frowning and sighing, and even letting Andy have a go once she comes back from her secret drive to the pharmacy in town. 

Together, they work hard prodding at certain useless threads, and when Nile wakes up, she takes a turn at running down the dozen rabbit holes and pingbacks he had planted for Copley over the years. Booker makes encouraging noises as he sips from his hip flask until it’s drained and then moves onto the small crate of old port and sherry left behind. 

It tests Andy’s patience, but he keeps up the false trails until even she feels like they’ve exhausted every possibility. In the cool confines of the mineshaft, Andy sits restlessly, paces relentlessly. Her shoulder heals up, and she still doesn’t say a word to him about it. 

They take it in shifts to watch the laptop screen and to head up to the surface for fresh air, and after a full day passes, Andy takes to sitting with Nile and answering her questions on whatever she’s uncovered from the crates. 

“I can’t believe you store shit like this.” Nile snorts at the Rodin for the third, or maybe fourth time, and Booker wonders if she might consider shoving it into her jacket before they leave. “Ever thought of sending it through to a museum?” 

“No.” A half-smile tugs at Andy’s lips. “But if you think that statue’s in bad shape, Joe’s stuff is all over the place. Especially whenever we’ve had to leave in a hurry.” 

“Until we end up having to steal it back.” Booker adds, counting off on his fingers, “Museums, art galleries, private collections are the worst...too much recon.” 

“Team effort.” Andy tags on, shaking her head. “Nicky’s _always_ game for it. And you can’t say no to Nicky.” 

Nile looks between the two of them. “No? How come?”

“Well…” He rolls his eyes. “An artist gets attached to their favourite pieces, and most of Joe’s favourites are of Nicky.”

“Sometimes we get roped into a retrieval, especially if there’s some anniversary of something cropping up.” She laughs at Nile’s bemused expression. “Saatchi doesn’t know he’s missing a few sketches. Or that Booker’s slipped in a few of his own pieces. Wasn’t it in ninety-three?” 

He nods back seriously. “London.”

Nile’s eyes go wide. “No way.” 

“Yeah, it’s not always like this.” Andy pulls a face that’s more wistful than remorseful. “We keep moving when we have to, but it’s not always running.”

“So, go on then. Tell me what it is like?” Nile shifts, trying to get more comfortable by the fire. 

Her attention was well and truly piqued. It’s her curiosity that makes the dank surroundings fall away, and Andy obliges her with one story after another. Booker falls into step, helping to peel back the pages on their family until he’s laughing along about an escapade that she and Quỳnh had through ancient Syria and can almost smell Nicky’s maraq- _“yes, yes I remember, with the apricots and lamb”,_ as she describes their five-year stopover in Khartoum.

They stay in the mineshaft for four days and five nights and he stays awake for most of the time, volunteering to keep watch on the computer searches so they can rest. When he thinks he’s timed himself out on stalling, Booker takes them on a wild goose chase for another three days. They drive through the south of France on winding country roads that smell of horseshit and wet grass and head into Spain on nothing but a trail of breadcrumbs. 

The overwhelming need to sleep falls on him like a ton of bricks in their Mac safe house with its running water in the bathroom with a real bathtub and beds with mattresses filled with memory foam and not straw or rocks. 

It’s too easy to drink himself unconscious to get some rest without watery dreams or too recent memories of a sterile lab. He gets a rude awakening a few hours later when he staggers bleary-eyed out of the bedroom to find both Nile and Andy sitting at his laptop and thinks - _fuck_. _You put enough breadcrumbs together...you got yourself a loaf._

Together they’ve pieced enough of it up to herd him into the car mere minutes later. “We’re getting them back. Whatever it takes.” Andy tells them both as she starts it up. 

She’s all fire, ready to burn Merrick’s delusions to the ground. 

The grit in her voice has Nile frowning, the same way she had been frowning when they’d made it out of the Charlie safe house. But she doesn’t say anything. Not with Andy working up a tempest in her blinkered rage now that she was back on the path to finding Joe and Nicky, to bringing her family home safe. 

Turns out that stalling doesn’t get them anywhere. The extra time he had bought them is useless when all three of them get captured. 

* * *

Booker spins the roulette wheel of elimination, knocking back random explanation after random explanation. If he is the only one to remember each time, then what else could it be for, if not to save her? 

Another round. Another failed attempt, and he is trapped in the lab. It never stops feeling like a game of cat and caught mouse as Kozak peels the skin from his chest. 

A new, logical conclusion bubbles up. 

“ _You_ did something. It must be you. What kind of science is this?” Deep in a haze of pain and tiredness, Booker pleads, “Can you make it stop?” 

“I’ve heard this from your friend for the past two days.” Kozak nods over at Nicky, sleeping rather than unconscious or dead. “Your friend there says that there’s intentions born with the work, with the dreamer, and there are others that try to influence it afterwards. It’s true, I am a dreamer. I dream that my name will go down in history with what I will do.”

Hearing the certainty in her voice, Booker lets out a huff of air and shuts his eyes. “You think you _deserve_ it? Andy doesn’t deserve this!” 

“My work with you four will change the world, forever. That’s why I was chosen. But I am curious. Has your friend ever managed to convince someone on the cusp of their life’s work to stop?”

Booker’s reply is instant. “Yes. Nicky has.”

“He couldn’t change yours though, because you understand how this works. You’re the reason there are four filled beds in my lab. You should be pleased. You’ll be credited in the footnotes of history _and_ live long enough to see it. I would say I envy you, but my name will be on the headlines.” 

He eyes the scalpel in her hand and sighs. “If it gets that far.”

* * *

Booker doesn’t even sigh at the sight of Copley’s house any longer.

He picks the back door lock easily, could have done it blindfolded, in the dark, with a concussion. His heart leaps into his throat and pounds as Andy passes him to take the lead. 

_Now. Now!_

He catches up to her before she hits the foot of the stairs and taps her shoulder twice. She freezes instantly. 

“Oslo.” Booker whispers, and waits for the lightest of inhales as she recalls a botched job with unreliable information that led them to be outnumbered. 

It comes and Andy nods once. Then she proceeds up the stairs without any more delay, and pauses at the top to allow him to pass. He takes the lead from her, creeping down the corridor to the left and she’s at his back when he kicks down the door and the security team are taken by surprise. 

It gives them enough time to get out. 

Outside, Booker smashes the window glass on Copley’s car and sets about pulling the wires out from underneath the steering wheel. His heart thumps away, still lodged in his throat and he chokes on his hope. 

But he also slips readily into it with the change in events. All the desperate waiting of cycle after cycle finally gives way for him to feel some relief when the wires spark and the engine kicks to life. Andy climbs in beside him with a perfunctory, “Go!” 

They catch a glimpse of Merrick standing alone on the driveway outside the house yelling at the top of his lungs and pointing as they drive past. It seems comical, but Booker doesn’t slow down for a better look. The wheels skid under the gravel and he looks to put as much distance between Andy and the last of the security team sprinting out of the house. 

He doesn’t see the van until it’s too late. A blur of black that collides with the right side of the car and sends it skidding sideways. 

Glass cracks. Shards fly. 

The airbags go off, slamming into his chest and face. 

Black. 

Booker doesn’t wake to Andy’s face in his. Not this time. But he does hear her groan in pain and whisper curses under her breath in a daze.

The security team arrive in seconds to drag them out of the car. 

* * *

He wakes. They run. They’re captured. She dies. 

Rinse and repeat. 

It leaves him hollow and unsteady on his feet as the guards approach. 

_Maybe she’s not supposed to make it out._

The thought occurs to him, like it hadn’t come around before. But he hadn’t listened before. He had thought himself clever enough to push it away, or oblivious, or ignorant. 

_Maybe, she’s not supposed to live past the end of the week. Maybe_ I’m _the one getting it wrong for trying to save her._

Booker staggers, numb legs bending a little too far. Everything was numb. Or hurt too damn much. 

Andy had implied it over time. That there was a reason for them being the way they were, even if she couldn’t explain it herself. 

“Maybe she’s right! But, also-” He sways as the ground rushes up to meet him and then suddenly rears backwards as the grey sky flows down towards him. “Also! Consider this! I don’t _want_ it. There’s no point to it! So here’s this for you!”

Booker points wildly to the ground, at the sky, and then to the security guard dropping back behind cover as more boots approach. 

“If she’s right, and we’re supposed to be so _useful_ … then why can’t I change it? What do you want me to do!” 

He rages on incoherently as the guards surround him. Despite the haze trampling down on his thoughts, Booker feels a shiver run up his spine just as it did when he walked down the steps on the Juba job. It’s different from déjà vu, this anticipation of dying.

“What are _you_ going to do about it… Kill me?” 

He doesn’t even hear the gunshots. 

When Booker wakes in the safe house to Andy’s voice calling him up out of the darkness again, he clings to the sound like a drowning man. _She’s alive here, she’s alive, she’s here, but what now, what will it take for this to end?_


	8. Loop 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This time round it had to be more than an all or nothing approach.

“You stay here. Wait for my signal.” 

Booker watches Andy go and sags back. All he’s fit to do while waiting to heal is brood. 

He’s pinned in place knowing that there is still no escape. All these years spent longing for an end in death had led him further into the darkness. In trying to find a way to end the constant cycle of living, all he had managed to do was to step over that invisible, final line, and hurt the only people who care about him. 

Dying over and over without use or reason was more pointless than it had ever been. 

He had too much time, and now it was not enough. Every loop of events ending with Andy’s death, and each one of his attempts to stop it had been futile. 

He’s faced down her shock and horror at his betrayal too many times, and it still hadn’t prevented her death. He had been dragged into the lab and seen Nicky and Joe picked apart for samples. In his towering stack of failures, his only consolation was that he had mostly managed to keep Nile out of the lab. 

Booker catches sight of her feet shuffling on the scorched rug, sees her fingers move across the gun to check the clip. “It looks bad. I’ll give you that.” 

Nile rolls her eyes and alternates between staring at his wounds and his blood-smeared face with a barely disguised look of horror. 

None of them, not even Andy, had done enough to earn Nile’s trust for her to stay put after introductions and dinner. Nile only did it out of necessity. Even now, it’s still practical for her to follow their lead, knowing so little about the situation that had chased them down to a safehouse in an abandoned village. 

And despite Nile putting herself between him and the door, Booker knows he hasn’t earned her worry either. She’d soon freeze at the sound of gunshots soon and her worry for Andy handling a fight alone would resurface. 

It makes him wonder. 

If anything, she might understand. 

As his bones crack and muscles stretch to lace back together, Booker pulls apart his new idea. Trying to confess to Andy outside the pharmacy or tipping his hand to make hints and nudge her down a path had been useless. Each time he had tried to stop Andy from going after Nicky and Joe had only earned her distrust. 

But it was important for him to stick close to Andy. He needed to keep her out of Merrick’s hands for as long as possible. That meant keeping her in sight and travelling south to her old hideout and then to Copley’s. It was going to have to be a play for time, and then the hope that _something_ different could work out. 

This time round it had to be more than an all or nothing approach. 

The light-headedness he feels has nothing to do with the blood loss. “Nile, I think, I need to tell you something.” 

She pulls a face. “If it’s to do with growing heads back. I don’t think I wanna know.” 

Booker manages to get out a wheezy laugh before his shattered spine cracks back into place and takes his breath away. It’s still too soon for him to stand on his own but the urge to move is overwhelming. “We need to be ready. Her signal. Help me up, please.” 

Tentatively, Nile levers him back to his feet and her attention spins back to the door when the gunfire starts. 

“Signal,” he cautions. “Wait for it.” 

* * *

When Andy heads out to patch herself up, Booker turns his attention to Nile. He taps half-heartedly at the laptop while trying to pick the _right_ moment. In trying to convince himself to something, anything, he wastes half an hour, and then goes to sit down by the fire. 

The pattern is this: necessity always gives way to her curiosity and Nile always goes around the cave poking at the boxes only to find one more unbelievable artifact or hoarded treasure. Then she returns to the task of setting up a place to sleep and splits their rations three ways. Despite Andy’s absence, she did take on her instructions to get some rest. 

There were only three people in the whole of existence he could talk to truthfully. 

But Nile was new. He had never met a fresh immortal before, and Booker had felt the same trepidation as Nicky and Joe when they had arrived at the Charlie safehouse. He had laughed along with Joe over the state of the carpets while he shook them out, watched Nicky dither over what to cook, and offered up a new bet on whether she’d like it or not.

When she had stepped in through the door with Andy, it had been an understated moment for their small family but all of them knew they were looking at a stranger who would in time come to know them, perhaps as well as they knew themselves. 

Booker didn’t know if he could count on her reaction, but it was a path he hadn’t taken yet. If it didn’t work, then his mistake would be erased for the next time. No harm and no foul, only another pointless death. 

He clears his throat awkwardly, no more prepared to speak than when he made the decision to. “Nile...we need to talk.” 

She pokes at the fire with a stick. “About what?” 

“About _this_. About how things are now-”

“Andy says I can’t go home.” The tilt of her head and the set of her jaw argue otherwise. “I don’t think it’s pointless. A few years might not mean anything to you, but this is my _family_ -”

When her voice cracks, Nile drops the stick to clasp her hands tight together on her knees. 

Booker nods, “I-” 

“She might have told you to speak to me but I’m not changing my mind. I’m not walking away from them.” 

“I don’t think I could ask that of you.” When Booker tries to smile back, his mouth does an approximation of a spasm and the sentiment is lost in the fire smoke between them. “But things _have_ changed. You’ll leave your old life behind not because you can or you should, or even because Andy says you must… you’ll do it because there is no other way.”

Nile’s nails dig into the back of her hand and expects her to say something back. While he waits for her to speak over the crackle of the fire, Booker watches the glowing flames dance and then shuffles closer to feel the warmth on his hands and face. 

There was an explanation he had been chasing ever since he had been cheated out of peace, dying and dying and dying for three nights straight. Or maybe had been stolen earlier as they marched into bitter winter that froze some part of him that never thawed back. Moscow had opened its gates to Napoleon’s men but the wild swamp in the heart of Russia had staked its claim on the land and had been determined to take as many men under as it could. 

It dragged soldiers to new depths as they tore strips of cloth off to keep warm, and then strips of flesh once they were driven mad from their hunger and forced to choose between death and the dead. 

Booker couldn’t make sense of his life afterwards. The despair had grown after he met Andy, Joe, and Nicky. They had given him some answers, all that they could share with him, but they had sparked more questions that festered over time. Now Andy expected for him to look back on his two hundred years and offer Nile some words of advice before those same wounds of family and love afflicted her, but what he could speak of was limited to his fading memories. In the end, his words could serve only as a cold comfort.

The silence drags on and when Booker sees Nile’s growing uneasiness, he waits patiently for her nod. “Who do you have? Your family?” 

Unconsciously, Nile wrings her hands before she speaks again. “My mom and my brother. My dad. When he died, I was eleven, my brother was only seven. It hit my mom hard. And it ended up being in the little things. We learned to look out for each other. Eventually we found a new way of living with his absence. We moved on, because we had to. But I won’t have them do that because of me, not while I’m still here.” 

“I outlived my wife and my sons.” Booker trades it back, truth for truth. “Two hundred years is longer than any other man has lived. Joe and Nicky are older, Andy even more so. You’ll live longer than a normal woman but it’s changed you already.” 

“What changed for you?” 

He swallows dryly. 

Before he gets the chance to fish out his hip flask, she passes over a bottle of juice. Her question is honest, and Andy was right. So he tells Nile what she will need to know. 

Booker tells her about his wife and sons, and how even the surest love can warp itself when there is sickness and pain, of human frailty and how it can sour and make a heart small and brittle. “...And when it finally breaks, it leaves jagged pieces that will always ache in the corners of your heart, no matter how well you can heal. It will stay with you.”

She sits and listens to it all, absorbing it rather than running for the tunnel back to the surface. “I’m sorry.” 

“No, I’m sorry. There are things you can sign up for.” Booker hangs his head. “But this, what we are now...this is your life now. Whether you want it or not.” 

“I saw the way Dizzy and Jay looked at me. They packed my bags. And they _know_ me.” Her hand reaches up to touch the cross on her necklace. “Sometimes, all you can do is try. One step, one day at a time. Andy called you guys an army, but you’re more than that. You’re family.”

Throwing over a weak smile, Nile gestures at the whirring laptop. “Look, whatever way it breaks down, I’m here. I can try to help. I was thinking if we follow the money, and it usually shakes out some leads.”

Booker freezes. 

It would be an easy way out. He could invite her to help and forget the whole idea. It would become one in a pile of many that hadn’t worked out. Only, he’d know he hadn’t seen it out. 

So instead, Booker chooses to stare back at the fire and speaks quickly so as not to lose his nerve. “I don’t need to search. I shared the location of our safehouse. And before you died in Afghanistan, I led us into a trap so a contact could get samples and pass them on to a specialist. To work on a cure. DNA. Blood-” 

Nile’s eyes flick from the fire to the tunnel and then back again, and he knows that she’s judging the distance between them. “Andy-” 

“She doesn’t know.” Booker shakes his head. “And we’re safe here. Nile, you are safe here. Copley doesn’t know about this place. Neither does Merrick.”

Stunned, she sits there in silence until her raw disbelief pours out. “But they’re meant to be your _family?_ Why did you do it?” 

He slumps and holds back a sigh. “I was desperate. Andy and Joe and Nicky...they’re old. They don’t feel it in the same way.” 

Leaning forward, Nile asks, “What way?” 

“I died, maybe before my time or maybe not. But my sons? I buried them. They died too young and I don’t think I’ll ever change my mind on that. Then I saw men who had been born around the same time as them go on to die in their old age. Surrounded by their children and their grandchildren. Their great-grandchildren, all of them, growing older each year… I grew sick of it. I _am_ sick of it. I’m tired of living like this, and I’m tired _because_ this is what I remember.” 

“And now? What made you change your mind and tell me?” In all her youth, she finds it easy to square up to him.

It surprises Booker more than he thought it would and he feels small as he replies, “I don’t think it’s supposed to be like this.” 

Then Nile tells him the five words he didn’t want to hear: “You need to tell Andy.” 

* * *

When Andy asks “ _why”_ it’s not said as a scream or a lament, or even a whisper. Just plainly. But it’s still loud enough to echo off the cave walls and in his ears. Booker thinks he might drown in the sound of Andy's voice. All her years, and she _still_ has to ask. 

It makes him want to flip it back: _isn't it obvious, I thought you knew, I thought you wanted this too, listen-_

He stops himself there, teeth clacking together. "Andy...I-"

"Joe and Nicky," she bites out the accusation. "You sold us out."

With his head bowed, he’s still desperate enough to hope. 

It doesn’t stop him from scoffing because he's said everything already. He’s tried his explanations on her before, torn off his regret and his shame from his chest and flung it back at her hoping she could salvage something out of it, and yet here they are again. 

He looks up to see her green eyes blazing and replies, "I was hoping for a miracle." 

Andy closes the distance between them and her fist connects violently with his face. When Booker blinks, he finds himself on the floor with waves of pain radiating out from his face. 

Above him, her mouth twists in fury and her rage explodes out from her chest. It spirals up her throat and into a banshee scream. Then Andy staggers off with her anger coiled back up inside her, seconds away from roiling back up. She wheels around to cut between him and Nile, fists twitching. 

Slowly sitting up, Booker doesn’t take his eyes off Andy. He breathes heavily until the blood stops pouring out of his broken nose and pokes at it gently until it resets itself with a sharp crack. “Ow. At least you didn’t push me under a truck.” 

“Don’t tempt me, Book,” Andy hisses back as she paces beside the dimming fire. 

"Andy?" Nile asks hesitantly. “You said you’d hear him out.” 

“I have!” When Andy drives her heel into the ground and spins, bitterness welling up in her.

“Your shoulder- you’re not healing. You can’t get them back alone. You need us." He hangs his hopes on the last word, hoping it would be enough to convince her. 

"A miracle?” Andy spits into the fire and scoffs. Her hand drifts up to her face, red knuckles covering her eyes.

"I know,” Booker replies lowly, and can’t offer anything other than that. 

She shoots a look of disgust at him before storming back up to the surface. It’s not an invitation but Nile shrugs as she follows, leaving him in the echoing silence. 

They come down together some time later and the tense silence cracks when Andy tosses the go-bag at him. “Priorities. We get Nicky and Joe. And then we deal with you.” 

* * *

They make it to London and get through the side doors of Merrick’s skyscraper. Andy throws herself into the fight. She’s the embodiment of a warrior goddess from ancient times, unleashing her vengeance with her labrys swinging powerfully. It goes smoothly enough. Nile’s quick to protect Andy’s back, taking several well-aimed bullets that would have floored her and they keep moving, as Booker is able to lead them into the heart of the building. 

But when they reach the fourth floor, they get pinned down. 

Keane’s team had been briefed, and with no detour to Copley’s and no leads they had remained on high alert to protect the two acquisitions already in the lab. They had learned their lessons from Juba, and the massacre at the church. 

They were well prepared to face down two competent and quick-healing soldiers. Nile’s presence hadn’t changed their indiscriminate firing. When she tries to clear a path into the corridor, she gets peppered thoroughly with a new round of bullets for her trouble. 

Luckily, she manages to keep on her feet and retreats around the corner. With her hands pressing against the healing wounds, Nile shakes her head. “There’s too many of them here! We can’t go through.” 

Booker’s frustration snaps and he slams his back against the wall. 

As they had fought their way in and met little resistance, he had dared to begin looking for a way out. But it had been a trap, and he felt sick to the core with his foolishness. It was clear something had to happen to shift the advantage again, or else they would be trapped until death found Andy again. 

That wasn’t the way out he wanted. Not while Andy was still standing and they still had a chance. 

When Booker looks back at Andy, he manages to unearth a spark of an idea. In another last-ditch attempt, he gives up a final scrap of information, a glimpse into their own future, and hopes it hasn't come too late to cost them. 

“Joe and Nicky,” he blurts out. “They got cuffed. Tranqed." 

“You _did_ see." Andy hazards a look around the corner and when she turns back to him, there’s a glimmer of a plan in her eye. “They’re running scared. We need to surrender. If we're taken in, on our terms, then we get to Joe and Nicky quicker.” 

“But the cuffs-”

“Do you remember Han? He was a useless fixer, but he had one good idea.” 

The glimmer turns into a grimace as she thrusts her labrys at him and Booker scrambles not to drop it. He realizes a second too late what Andy’s about to do when she leans her wrist against the wall. Before he can react, she sucks in a deep breath, and violently jerks to the side.

Nile squirms in horror at the resulting snap. 

"There," pants Andy. "No cuffs."

"Fuck, no." Nile's grip on her rifle tightens and she gulps in a breath. "Fuck!"

“That hurts more than I thought it would." Looking down at her broken wrist with watering eyes, Andy lets out a weak chuckle and cradles it against her chest. In mere moments, the wince of pain evaporates from her twisted lips with a hiss. "Drop the gun Nile. Book, lead the surrender."

Nodding back, Booker’s mind went reeling at the new injury. Her quick thinking meant it would gain them access to Nicky and Joe, which was what they needed, but she would be hindered at some point. All he could do now was hope it wouldn’t lead them to another dead end. 

With his gun hanging uselessly at his side, Booker steps around the corner and shouts over the new shots that punch new holes in his torso. "We're coming out! We're surrendering. One of us is injured. Don’t shoot." 

Instructions came back: "Weapons down. Come out, one by one. On the floor. Slowly." 

Booker throws the labrys and his gun up the corridor first where they skid out of reach. When he gestures for Nile to hand over hers, she’s reluctant to let go. "It'll be alright, kid. We'll make it out." 

"An army of five, right?" asks Nile. 

Andy's grin is razor sharp when she steps out to be captured. 

* * *

They're taken to the lab with a small escort. Booker and Nile are cuffed at the wrists and ankles while Andy remains sandwiched between two guards with her broken wrist kept steady against her chest. There’s a garble of noise down the radio of the guard leading the way, and when the lab doors open, Keane is already there rolling a new bed into place. 

“Strap them down.” His eyes flick to Andy’s wrist and then to Nile, the two surprises caught in their seemingly infallible net. 

Booker doesn’t struggle when his back is slammed against the bed. It’s happened so many times he’s grown indifferent to the flat surface. Andy kicks out redundantly when the guards try to pull her hand away from where she’s tucked it close. Her eyes water in pain, but she doesn’t flinch as their gloved hands prod at the joint and confirm the injury. 

“Leave the cuff off on that side. She can’t move it,” orders Keane. 

With his face schooled into a passivity he had learned from winding up in the lab so many times, Booker fights the urge to crow. _This is it! Everything has changed, there’s still a chance!_

"Andy?" Nicky calls out, concern bleeding out from every pore. "What happened?" 

Nile is the one to answer, ignoring the warnings from the guards to stay silent. "It's broken! She's not healing." 

Joe’s resultant groan adds to the increasing swirl of noise. 

"Don't you dare write me off," Andy snaps back in Ligurian as she breathes through the pain. 

"Never," Joe promises back. 

When Kozak approaches to take a look, one of the guards raises his arm to hold her back. She’s kept from getting closer until all three of them are strapped down to the beds. The doctor’s face grows pinched and she reverts to scribbling on her clipboard, muttering under her breath about the possibilities of delayed healing and age. 

Once they’re secured to Keane’s satisfaction, the rest of the guards file out, taking the extra weapons and labrys with them. 

Keane holds up his radio. "Merrick wants a report. I’ll go brief him on the new assets, and _her_.”

"He'll have it in an hour." Kozak gleefully eyes the full contingent of immortals. “I’ll treat the wrist first.” 

She hastily gathers the last batch of samples taken from Nicky and Joe before disappearing out of the room with Keane. The door swings shut behind them, leaving them alone and free to speak. 

"At least we are together now," says Nicky with a tight smile. Nile scoffs, but his good humour eases her enough for her harsh breathing to even out. “We won’t be here for long, we promise.” 

“What’s the plan, boss?” Joe leans up, the muscles in his neck cording when he tries to look at Andy. 

Her wrist lies uselessly against the arm rest but despite the injury, Andy’s grin returns. "Book remembers Han. Do you?" 

There’s a strangled noise from Nicky and Joe’s mouth hangs open. Booker winces at the ceiling, the flat tiles offering no sympathy once more. 

"You do. Good. Nile, all you'll need to do is keep up when you're back on your feet." Her encouragement is generous given how little time they have.

Then Andy reverts back to Ligurian and her plan is everything Booker had hoped for since he had first confessed to her. Quick and explosive, capitalising on the fact that the four of them were together, able to work efficiently and smoothly. Nile’s presence would be an added bonus, someone who knew how to work in a team and keep up in a fight. 

Andy had also taken on board his pleading. He had broken the tense silence on the drive away from the mines only to stress that there was little use in trying to wrap up all the loose ends. She hadn’t liked it, but she had agreed that they would deal with Copley and Merrick at a later time. 

Now Booker’s input on the plan was to ensure that Andy is covered by at least two of them at all times, despite her trying to brush it off as unnecessary. The fear of her dying that he had been carrying alone was now a burden shared. 

Thankfully, Nicky and Joe waste no time in asking about how they managed to enter the building, and Andy hints at nothing gone awry beyond the five of them getting out. Her strategy would mean they would all be left to fully focus on their escape. 

Booker knows that by putting off the truth until later, it would be set against this final battle, and the weight of his betrayal would become heavier. It might even be too much to reverse. It wasn’t something he had the headspace to think about. They would all eventually know that he put them there in the first place, and he would have to face it. So long as Andy was free of the lab and they were able to demand it of him, it was a price he’d be willing to pay.

When Kozak returns with an ice pack, a splint, and a fresh needle and vial, Andy lies still on the bed and allows her to approach. Biding her time, she lets Kozak strap up her wrist and inject the anaesthetic. Then she moves like lightning, wrapping her arm around the woman's neck and squeezing tight. 

Kozak struggles against the vice around her throat, flailing uselessly. 

Andy waits it out, suppressing a scream. Her face twists in pain as her grip puts pressure against her splinted wrist. She lets go only when the thrashing stops, and Kozak slides onto the floor in a crumpled heap. 

With her numbed fingers, Andy clumsily rips off the restraint on her good arm and makes quick work of the rest. As she moves on to release the others, Booker dares to hope that they're over the worst of it. 

“Let’s go!” says Andy. 

But Nile’s hand on her shoulder draws Andy away from the doors. “Wait, let me help.” 

With the smallest of nods, Andy pauses long enough to allow Nile to split her injured wrist to her chest. 

Booker joins Nicky and Joe on taking point, with Andy and Nile falling in behind them. Adrenaline races through his veins and the submerged crackle of it reaches his clenched hands. The deafening sound of his heartbeat thumps in his ears as he readies himself for another fight. 

When Joe nods, Booker opens the door, and they head out. 

There had been one guard stationed outside of the room. Adding speed to his charge, Booker body slams him into the wall, leaving Andy to single handedly rip the rifle out of his lax hands and shoot him. Beside her, Nile takes his pistol and extra clip. 

“Let’s go!” Nicky calls and Booker sprints to keep up while Joe switches position to bring up the rear. 

The end of the main corridor is blocked by another pair of guards who make the fatal error of hesitating. Caught between calling in the new security breach and acting, their fear takes over and as the first guard, they are disarmed quickly and stripped of their weapons. 

With each successful step, Booker inches towards giddiness. He finds himself grinning as he holds the stairwell door open for them all to pass through and they race downstairs to the basement car park. On a landing halfway down, they pass an inbuilt panel with a fire hose and Andy sights a fire axe beside it. She hands off her gun to Nicky and rips the axe from the wall.

As they continue the spiral downwards, Andy tests out the weight with a couple of twists. It’s small enough for her to handle with one hand. Booker catches her flashing a grin at Nile before they burst through the doors and into the car park. 

Despite the lack of alarms, they had been caught on camera. 

They manage to get halfway across the basement when they’re met with a barrage of bullets. While they know they can’t afford a full retreat to the staircase, it still forces them back against the concrete wall. The five of them take cover between the parked cars that are instantly ruined by the furious gunfire, glass shattering in wide arcs. 

Joe smashes through the closest car’s window and slides across to take off the handbrake. “Push!” 

Shoving their shoulders up against the side, Booker and Nicky hand over their guns to Nile and get the van rolling forwards. Behind them, Nile continues to fire over the trunk to keep the guards from gaining ground. She throws down one empty gun after another as they make their way across to exit. 

But their path is cut short and their makeshift battering ram comes to a dead stop when the tires are shredded. 

“We’re out.” Nile throws the final rifle down and presses close to Andy to catch another bullet. Rather than waiting for it to be pushed out from her skin, she pulls it from her shoulder with morbid fascination. 

“Ideas?” Joe’s voice is strained as they take cover again.

Nicky tips his head and offers, “Haiti?” 

“Not enough room,” says Andy. 

Looking across, Booker can see she’s right. Keane’s team had spread out to form a loose semicircle, to close in on them. The relief he had felt at the top of the staircase had been misplaced because now there was only the familiar clawing of dread and the cold sweat setting in over his chest.

“This is bullshit!” Andy makes the decision in the blink of an eye and barks out a fresh plan. “France, nineteen-seventeen. On me!”

Before Booker can swallow his nerves, she’s slipped out and is twisting herself and the fire axe in one-handed circles to build up momentum. He doesn’t remember, doesn’t understand what Andy means until she's out of reach. 

The loose semi-circle of guards shifts forwards and it puts Andy into the thick of the fight. At close quarters, they are forced to abandon their rifles to avoid harming each other and have to resort to nightsticks. Nile, Joe, and Nicky follow her lead, snatching whatever weapons they can wrestle from their opponents. 

It is the opposite to the clean getaway Booker had been banking on. He joins them and the fight descends into a violent, bloody brawl. Working hard to break down the guards’ advantage, they slice, shoot, and punch their way through the circle. 

In the scrum, Nile shifts to cover any gaps when Andy strikes out. Acting like a shadow, she takes those bone-shattering hits that once would have knocked her down. It reminds Booker of his early days, forcing himself to push past the flinching pain that made a normal soldier retreat out of self-preservation. With a body that continues to heal, the fear no longer applies to her, and Nile treats it like a test with every block. 

Their path to the door is almost cleared but as Andy raises the axe, she’s caught by a flurry of bullets from a guard who drew his pistol as a last-ditch attempt to escape. Mouth gaping, Booker watches helplessly as Andy crashes to her knees with blood spreading out across her top. 

She coughs up blood and with the last of her strength holds out the axe to Nile. “Go.”

"No! No!" Joe throws down his stolen nightstick to pick Andy up. "Come on, Andy. Come on!" 

With rasping breaths, Booker scrambles forward, trying to reach for her. “Is she breathing?” 

There’s a few more grunts and clattering behind him and the last of the security team fall to the floor. Then Nicky pushes past him to shoot out a panel on the wall. He waits until the shutter blocking the ramp to the street starts to rise, and only then does he start racing back.

“Book, start a car!” Nicky calls frantically. 

Numb, Booker turns to Nile, equally frozen on the spot. 

“We were so close. Andy was still fighting. I don’t understand? There were five of us. We could have made it.” He looks around, trying to find the flaw. “There were two security teams here. It was the numbers. But we picked up more guns. Wasn't there more?"

Nile’s eyes stay locked on Andy cradled in Joe’s arms when she answers, "Ammo was already half-used. And one of them had jammed." 

"You checked?"

"I always check," Nile snaps back. 

Then she shakes her head and stumbles forward to get closer to Joe. She helps him gently put Andy in the back of the closest car, but Booker can tell that she was already gone. His bigger wounds have healed but the bruises left on his skin haven’t disappeared. His heart aches desperately but he can’t look away.

Flinging the driver door open, Joe yells, "There’ll be more coming! We have to go _now_!" 

Nile slides in at the back, beckoning Booker to get in. He goes to follow but finds he can’t move his feet.

Joe and Nicky and Nile were free from the lab. That was the plan. That was what they had decided on. Although Andy hadn’t made it out alive, she wouldn’t have wanted her death to slow their escape. She had known she would die, and she told them to go. So why did it still feel like giving up? 

He still can’t take his eyes off her, can’t make himself sit down beside Nile so that Joe could drive them out.

Andy had to live.

Booker wasn’t unselfish like her. He couldn’t leave without her, wouldn’t take another step down this path where her death was a reality.

It would never be enough trying to save Andy alone; he had tired himself out with trying that. Yet with Nile onside, this had been the closest. There was something in the way she had offered to help to track leads, how she listened to him confess and then made Andy listen, or the way she always threw herself in front of Andy once she knew the healing had gone; Nile always managed to surprise him. 

They _needed_ the element of surprise. 

There was only one thing he hadn’t tried. _Nile,_ he thinks _, it’s Nile._ He doesn't want it to be on a whim or a prayer, but maybe it wouldn't be. 

"Always? You always check your guns?" 

Still holding the door open for him, Nile nods back, confused. 

It’s enough, and Booker runs back towards the stairwell and into the line of fire.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> finally got to the point where I can embed this beautiful artwork!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Booker and Nile](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28511139) by [alby_mangroves](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alby_mangroves/pseuds/alby_mangroves)




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